Principles of Animation: The Art of Appealing Motion for Beginners

1. Principles Of Animation: Let's learn to animate. Welcome to this class, Principles of Animation: The Art of Appealing Motion for Beginners. My name is Lucas Ridley, and I'll be your instructor. I've been a professional animator for the last 10 years, working on movies like Disney's Aladdin, Avengers: Infinity war, Ready Player One, and video games like The Last of Us Part II. The animation principles should never be learned in the vacuum of a single software. When you're learning animation, it's important to understand the universal nature of these principles that they can be applied to any animation medium, and so that's how we're going to learn them in this course. We're going to be taking a variety of animation mediums to help learn and demonstrate these principles. This course is set up so that after each lesson there's an assignment and demonstration, so that you can see these principles put into action right after you learn them. This course is for anyone who's new to animation and for also those self-taught animators out there who might have a few knowledge gaps, they need help connecting a few dots on. You don't need any fancy software or you don't need to be great at drawing to take this course. This course was created for everyone to begin their journey as an animator, so you can follow along with things you can find around your house. As long as you have a cell phone, something you can take pictures with, you can start animating and I will show you how in this course. Thanks for watching. I look forward to seeing you in class. 2. Course Overview: Learning animation is like building a house. You first have to start with the foundation so the house has something to stand on, and then you can add the fancy bits later on, like the trim and what not. But if you started with the trim and all the fancy, that's first, there'll be nothing for them to attach to and the whole house will just fall down. You must first develop a solid foundation for the house to stand on and then you can add that fancy stuff later on. Even from time to time, you have to refresh and keep your tool sharp on the foundation. That's what this course is for. A lot of times I'll see students try to start with the fanciest and the prettiest stuff first, like lip-sync animation. I've thought about it a lot and and we've talked about it too. They'll want to jump right into that advanced stuff because that looks the most interesting. But what ends up happening is those students get very frustrated because those are more advanced concepts and they don't have the foundational principles laid in yet. All those concepts have nothing to hang on and it all falls down just like the house that has no foundation. That's why it's important to first grasp all these foundational principles. The course is laid out that we are going to start first with the background information and the history and science behind animation, where it comes from and why it works. Then we'll jump into learning the most famous principles of animation. We'll do mini-projects along the way so that you can learn and test these principles as well as learning different types of animation mediums and how to animate in those mediums, and even if you don't have those tools, what that looks like. But most of the course you'll be able to follow along with even one medium, if you just wanted to stick with like a flip book or stop motion animation or whatever it is, you can apply all of these principles to things that you have around your house. Towards the end of the course, I'll add a few of my own principles I've learned from working as a professional in the animation industry for almost 10 years. It's the stuff that you probably won't find in textbook. Then we'll end the course with what your next steps could be in your journey as an animator and learning animation. Before we begin, let's create our first animation together so that we have something to compare our progress to at the end of the course. I'll see you in the next class. 3. Demo + Assignment 1: A creative brief for this project is to animate a line and animate it anyway that you want to. Part of the learning process is also coming up with ideas on how and what to animate. We're going to keep it simple because a line is as simple as it gets, so don't worry about not being good at drawing or anything like that and animate it anyway you want. I'm going to animate it spinning in a circle. It's just very simple thing that if you don't have your own idea, you can just follow along with what I'm doing so that you just get in the practice of animating and putting pen to paper and actually doing the animation. Grab a pencil or a pen, and a post-it note stack, or the corner of a notebook will do just as fine too. We're going to create a little flip book, and it's okay if you don't know how to animate just yet as the point of this exercise is to get a baseline to have something to compare to at the end of the course, you can see how far you've come and how much you've learned. We're going to want at least 12 drawings so that we can see the animation work. I'd like to start a few pages in so that you have a little something to help with the flipping motion. Because I know I'm going to do 12 drawings and I want the line to spin around in 360 degrees, all I have to do is just divide 360 by 12 drawings, and that means each drawing needs to change by 30 degrees. Let's get started. Now, if you don't have any pencil or paper around, or if you just prefer to use your computer, you could actually use your web browser to animate with free websites. I have a list of them in the PDF that's associated with the downloads for this course, so if you would like to skip ahead in the types of animation mediums we're going to use, you could go ahead and use that now as well. Keep in mind now this animation medium then would be called 2D digital animation, whereas what we're going to do with the post-it notes and paper is 2D traditional animation. In a future lesson, we will be using this animation medium together, so don't worry about that, we're going to come back around to it. For now, I'm going to get started with post-it notes and 2D traditional animation. One trick to this is that I'm going to use the corner here because that'll give me more corners to work on if I wanted to try again if I mess up or something like that. If you work in a corner, it's actually better than working in the middle, it'll give you more room to work if you mess up. Let's begin. I'm going to go a few pages deep here, and I'm going to just draw a straight line. I'm going to draw perpendicular to one of the edges so that I know where I'm starting and where I'm going. I'm just going to draw a little line here. I'm using a black pen so that it's a little more easily seen. One other trick is, if you actually push down hard, you'll be able to see in, the next page, where you had marked so that you can know where your drawing was so it won't go to off-center and wobbly. Let's go to the next page. I know I need to go 30 degrees, so I'll do something like that and I'll draw one here. Then I'll go to the next page, I'll draw another one, and I'll go to the next page and just continue on. You don't have to stay with 12 drawings, you can actually do more than that. We're just going to go until I think we have enough and it looks good. You can already start to test it just even after few drawings to make sure you're staying in the right place. I'm going a little bit off, so I want to make sure I stay a little higher than where I'm going. To the next one. Straight up and down again. Now we've gone 180 degrees. I'm just going to do that a little bit harder so I can see where it was. Animation, it takes some time and it takes a lot of patience, so don't get too frustrated if this takes some time, that's part of the enjoyment too, it's a bit of a meditation here. Now we just have 90 degrees more to go. Then the final drawing is back to the beginning of just a straight up and down line. Let's test that out. There is our first animation of just a line spinning around. It's that simple and you don't need any crazy software to achieve this. Now that we've completed our animation, we'll be able to save this and compare it to what we do with that same creative brief after we've learned all of these animation principles. It'll be really fun to see the progress you've made by the end of the course. The different ways you think about animation when you approach a creative brief that's very open-ended, like animate a line, and the things and tools you're going to have after taking this course, it's going to help you be creative and think of appealing ways to create motion. In the next lesson, let's get started with some of the history behind the animation, where these principles come from, and who brought them into existence? I'll see you in the next class. 4. History of Animation Principles: Let's start learning a little bit about the history of the principles of animation, where they originated from because they didn't always exist, but they're not as old as you might expect. It's always important to learn the history of an art form, not just for appreciation of its own merit, but to use the knowledge of all the people that went before you towards your own efforts creating in that art medium, and in our case, it's animation. So the animation principles, as we know them today, were actually created in the 1930s and onwards by a group of nine animators at Disney Animation Studios, and they were affectionately referred to as the nine old men. Two of them published a book in the 1980s called the Illusion of Life. It would be a really good extra curricular reading for you, if you're interested in diving deeper into the history of animation, especially Disney animation, where these principles originated from. They originated from these guys who were testing animation in short films, and they were called the Silly Symphonies. It's a similar tactic that Pixar has used recently, when they actually had a studio in Vancouver, Canada, dedicated to creating short films to help push the medium of animation. That's an example of history repeating itself and learning from history, and where Pixar took a page out of the book of Disney animation to focus on short film so they could do shorter project cycles and learn and apply all the things they learned from a short film into their feature films. That's what Disney was doing and where they started to realize that there were certain principles that could be applied to all their animation, and that's where they started to codify these principles and what we're going to learn in this course. Let's go back and stay in the 1930s and '40s for a moment, that is considered the Golden Age of animation. Back then, animation was considered like a carnival or a magic trick, and one really good historic example is Gertie the Dinosaur. In 1914, Winsor McCay had these vaudevillian acts where he would stand on stage in front of a big screen and command this animated dinosaur around on screen, and no one had seen anything like it before. Felix the Cat is another good example from this time period that the public saw regularly, but that character lost steam over time. The general public and production never thought that animation could make the leap from this magic trick carnival show into feature films, and making the leap from something very short into something long like a feature film and compete with what at the time were called talkies, which are movies that had sound. So was never really considered at that time, that things that they saw as basically like a little trick could compete with the big productions of something like a live action movie. In this Golden Age of animation, there were other studios in the game too. It wasn't just Disney working on animation. You had Warner Brothers, UPA, Fleischer Studios, and 20th Century Fox Terrytoons. One of my favorite interpretations of Superman came from Fleischer Studios. So your assignment for this lesson is going to be to watch a few cartoons to see the progression of animation over time. Start with one of the Silly Symphonies called the Skeleton Dance from 1929, and then look up the Fleischer Studios Superman interpretation in 1941 called The Mad Scientist. I'll put links to those two animated short films in the PDF that comes along with the course. But links change, and so you might have to search for them by name as well on YouTube. But I want you to notice the difference in quality. Just over a decade from 1929 to 1941, how far the medium of animation came. That is in part due to these principles that you're going to learn about, because over that time period, that's when the nine old men from Disney were starting to codify these 12 principles and apply them into their animation. But keep in mind, there's so much more to learn about animation than just these 12 principles we're going to learn in this course. But it's where you have to necessarily start to begin your journey as an animator. But one important other thing to notice is as we go through the course and learn these principles, we're also going to learn different mediums so that you can really take to heart that these principles don't rely on any one medium of animation. For example, you could animate squash and stretch with a Post-it note like we did with align. You can animate it with stop motion, clay, you could do it in 3D animation. It doesn't really matter. What we're going to learn is going to be able to apply to every medium of animation. That's why it's so important to learn this early in your animation journey, so that you can take this toolkit and begin to apply it to all these different interests and avenues that animation can take you down. But keep in mind, there's so much more to learn than just these 12, but it's the perfect place to start. The other thing that's really fun to do is to see these animation principles applied out in the wild. You'll be watching an animation or a movie or something, and you can start to see these things applied in the real world. As now that you'll know how to identify them, you can begin to call them out and see how they're applied in different situations, which is really cool. It will help further your education, which is why the assignment is to do a little homework and some some of the best homework is why I like animation is because you get to watch fun stuff. In this lesson, we learned the backstory of animation, where it came from, who started codifying these principles. You have an assignment to follow, so you have nothing pen to paper to do, but just to begin to train your eye to see the differences. Even if you can't articulate what they are yet, you'll be able to begin to articulate that as you learn the principles throughout the course. Now we have an appreciation of the backstory of where animation has come from, let's begin to learn a little bit about the science behind why our eye can be tricked into believing that a bunch of still images back to back actually look like motion. 5. Science of Animation: Animation works because of a natural phenomenon in our brain called persistence of vision. This isn't a principle of animation. We'll get to those after this lesson, but it is important to help understand the how behind animation working and also illuminate the why of certain things that happened in animation like different frame research chosen and concepts of limited animation which we'll get to later on in this lesson. But first, before we jump into all that, let's look at an example of persistence of vision. We see an object because light reflects off of that object and into our eye by passing through the lens of the eye, which flips this image and projects it onto the back of the eye where the retina is. This flipped image is then carried up the optic nerve to the brain, where the brain flips the image right side up. If we remove the light, we can no longer see the image, but if you notice the image in our mind doesn't disappear as quickly as the light was removed, the image persists in our mind for an instant after we can no longer see it. Let's say we flash another image again before the first is deemed out of our mind. We can create the illusion of continuity between the two images because they'll overlap in our mind. If there's a slight difference between the two images, like it changes position, or shape, then our brain will perceive that as motion. This is essentially an optical illusion. A really good example of this is the rubber pencil trick. Grab a pencil or a pen and try this yourself because it's actually easier to see in person than it is going to be to see it on camera, but grab the pencil gently in your fingers like this, and give it a very slow wobble motion. Our brain is interpreting where the pencil was and where it is simultaneously. It's interpolating between these two positions and makes it look like the pencil is actually bending when it's not. That's persistence of vision at work. More futuristic example of this is LED light strips that spin. If you take a look at the image of this device, you'll see it's actually just one strip of LED lights, but if those lights spin fast enough so that they blend together, and the lights change quick enough, our minds and our eye register that as a single image. The film industry needed to take advantage of persistence of vision to create films, but they also wanted to reduce their costs. Because making films is expensive, especially back in the day when they landed on a frame rate of 24 frames per second around the 1920s when sound came into play in films and everyone needed to standardize the frame rate so that sound could sync up with the films. That means that for every one second of film, there's 24 images. That's what 24 frames per second means. Twenty four frames per second is about as low as you can go in a frame rate without the human eye being able to tell the difference between individual frames. Animation production has always been a time-consuming and expensive endeavor. Animation studios discovered that they could actually get away with one drawing for every two frames. That means that they only needed 12 drawings for every one second or 24 frames, with a very little compromise in the smoothness of motion that you get from persistence of vision. They were really pushing the boundaries of persistence of vision to help save money and time. This is called animating on twos. Despite these practical decisions to reduce cost and save time, it's actually become a bit of a throwback to animate on twos again to make it look like it's handmade. You'll see this a lot in motion design now especially where people will be animating on a computer like an after-effects or something like that where by the nature of the program, you're animating on once or every frame changes. What they'll do after they're done with the animation is create an effect on their animation that was done on ones to make it look like it was animated on twos. It'll hold every other frame. That's actually something I'm doing on the titles of this course. If you look at the lower thirds and all the little text that pops up, I'm animating that in After Effects, and then I add what's called a Posterize Time effect. I basically delete every other frame and hold the one before it. You don't have to follow along, but I just wanted to show you what that looks like in After Effects, because it's pretty simple, but what it does is it gives something a handmade feel because we've trained our eyes to associate something animated on twos with a much more tactile, authentic feeling of it being handmade. People will actually revert to that as something in their animation even though they can make it smooth, but this is what it looks like in After Effects. You basically apply what's called the Posterize Time effect to your layer and you change the number to be whatever frame rate you want. In this example, it's 24 frames per second to start. I'm setting the effect to 12, which will create the effect of holding each image for two frames instead of a new frame on every frame. If you're really into stop-motion animation, you'll be able to tell a huge difference between the movies like A Nightmare Before Christmas, and the more recent stop motion movies, really, any of them out of the Laika studio like the movie, A Missing Link, with the big difference being that A Nightmare Before Christmas is animated on twos mostly, and the missing link is animated on ones mostly, meaning they're moving the puppets every single frame. They're not taking advantage or trying to cut corners to save time and money, they're animating every frame. That's why a lot of times people will confuse their stop motion animated movies for CGI animation. Another way animation production saves money is by something called limited animation. That's when they have a static background and only the characters change on each new drawing. That way they can save time and money so they don't have to redraw the background every time the character moves. That's why you'll notice that a lot of the earlier animations too have much more detailed backgrounds because they're not having to redraw it every new frame. The characters themselves are much more simplified because that's what the animator is going to have to redraw over, and over again. Take a look at this example to see what I mean. Check out the background here and then look at the character. There's a huge difference in detail, and that's why. There is an equivalent that can happen in 3D animation when sometimes you'll actually bake the lighting of a scene into the textures of the objects so that the renderer is not having to calculate all the light bouncing around every time you render a frame. Animation productions have also been known to reuse animation a lot. You can actually notice it in some early Disney films where they used the same performance over and over again. That's was to help save money and time so they could get the movies done, and under budget. You'll also notice in TV animation, this happens a lot where the character is talking and they will stick a pose and just keep talking and only their mouth is moving, and then they'll hit another pose and then just keep their mouth moving. This is also a version of limited animation so that TV productions can crank out a lot more content than is required on a feature and under a shorter time span usually. That's also another version of limited animation where they try to take advantage of static poses even in the characters. If it was what is called full animation, you would see the very subtle motions of a character talking and moving quite a lot. I'm over-performing right now, but you get the idea, whereas in maybe a show like Family Guy, we'll get Peter to just stand like this and talk, and then hit another pose and talk, talk. Whereas in a full animation feature film, the characters are always moving, and that's also a big difference between the full animation and limited animation. That's just a constraint of the time, and budget, and resources that each of them have. In this lesson, we learned about persistence of vision, and how that's an important optical illusion to understand the how and why animation in film work. Then we learned about frame rates and why those frame rate numbers are chosen, and how animation can actually get away with working on twos, and what that means. Then we finished with understanding what limited animation was and how that can be used to animation's advantage to get things done for different constraints of different kinds of projects. Now we're going to move on to the assignment in the next lesson. We're going to take what we've learned and really push the concept of persistence of vision by creating an animation with only two drawings, and we're going to trick our eye into believing that there's motion there. Let's take that knowledge that we now have and put it on paper. I'll see you in that next lesson. 6. Demo + Assignment 2: Welcome to your assignment for persistence of vision. We're going to push this optical illusion concept to its breaking point by creating an animation with only two drawings. We're going to achieve this with something called a thaumatrope. This was invented in 1825 by an English physician, and it was a popular children's toy, if you can believe it, back in the day. The tools we'll need, I'm going to use my trusty post-it notes again because they have a sticky back to them, and we need a pen, I'm going to use a permanent marker. Be careful if you use one of these. Because it's a thicker pen, it'll be easier to see the illusion once we start spinning it. We need something to attach it to to spin the thaumatrope. You can use string as well, but this is just easier for me and I think it's less complicated than trying to tie knots in string. Let's get started. For this animation, we're going to draw a bunny rabbit popping out of a top hat. Let's get started. I'm going to start with the sticky part at the top here, and I'm going to draw the hat at the bottom. I'm going to draw one curve here, and then I'm going to draw two curves for the side, and then I'm going to draw the brim of the hat as an oval here, and then draw the inside of the hat, where the hole is, and then draw a little band here to signify the top part. I'm a professional 3D animator, I'm not that good at drawing, so I trust that you can follow along and do this as well. The next drawing we're going to do is the bunny rabbit popping out. We have this one. We're going to gently remove this and put its sticky side up over here so that it can stay sticky. What I'm going to do is actually grab my iPhone here and use a free Flashlight app that actually has a white screen. What you can do is actually use that as a light table so you can see through the drawing. I'm going to take a new paper and our drawing, and the sticky side is up right now, so I'm just going to rotate this so that there's a sticky side here and a sticky side here. They are basically going to enclose each other so that we have a sticky side on both ends. It doesn't have to be perfect, but somewhere in the neighborhood. I'm going to flip this over so that we can see through this and trace it, but I'm not going to trace it entirely because we need to leave room for the bunny rabbit. I'm going to start with the top rim and just leave the very top part of it open so that we can draw the bunny rabbit, and then draw and trace the rest of it. Now that we have that done, we can get rid of the phone and draw the bunny rabbit, which is the fun part. I'm going to draw a rounded bunny rabbits. I'm going to draw little belly here and then I'm going to have the arms coming out rubber hose style, meaning very bendy, and signify a little thumb there. Then I'm going to draw a very round face and then leave some room for the ears, which is very important for a bunny rabbit. We'll have one ear there and I'm going to do another ear, maybe bent. Then just give him some eyes, a nose, and a mouth, and maybe that typical cartoon rabbit belly there. There is our magic rabbit. Now, the magic comes when we put this to the pencil. Grab your pencil, first, we need to separate these pieces of paper, so very gently remove them from one another because we need to sandwich the pencil between them now. I can start here. You could either start at the top edge or we could go all the way up so that the sticky side will only be touching paper now. We'll give our hands a little more room to spin on the pencil as well. Then now we have this sticky side, which is going to go here, and I just need to line up the corners. There we go. Then gently mash these down so it will keep the pencil in the center, and then just gently mash those down so we will have a little thaumatrope. There we go. Now all that's left to do is spin this bad boy. Depending on how slow you do, it will affect how much popping is going on or not. You can make it look like he's there the entire time. If you spin it fast enough or if we slow it down, it'll look like he's popping in and out of the hat. Give that a try yourself because the effect works much better in person than it probably does on film. But that is a thaumatrope and how much you can get away with persistence of vision with only two drawings. In the next lesson, we're going to start learning the 12 principles of animation so you can become a better animator. Thanks for watching. 7. Squash & Stretch: Welcome to your first lesson, learning about one of the principles of animation. But before we begin, I wanted to give a little disclaimer about these principles. I've said before, these aren't the only things you need to learn to be able to animate. Animation, why I love is because it's a never ending process of learning. But these are the things you need to start with. It would be like a chef who is trying to cook something, but doesn't know what the ingredients are or has never tasted them. Imagine these 12 principles is like new ingredients that you've never tasted. It may seem overly simple that we're breaking them down so much, but that's part of it. It's like tasting each flavor of an ingredient so you know when they combine, what they're all going to taste like. That's what this is like and making sure before we start combining things that we understand each element on their own. Let's get started learning our first animation principle called squash and stretch. It's a very playful and one of my favorite principles of animation because it adds so much life to any animation. But it's exactly as it sounds. It is the squash or the compression of an object under stress or on an impact, and it is the converse of that the stretch or the lengthening of an object into its extreme pose. That yin and yang of an object is what we find in nature. It's how our bodies work, it's how our muscles work. They contract and they relax, they compress and they expand and stretch. You can also see it on a macro and a micro level. You could see squash and stretch on a macro level of the entire silhouette of something changing, so it's very obvious. Then you could see something on a micro level, squash and stretch, like just the blinking of an eye or chewing of food and how the face even squashes and stretches. Then again on the macro level, if someone jumps, they compress down before they jump up and so you have this squash and stretch that you can see at every level once you start looking for it. The most important aspect of achieving the proper squash and stretch on something is to maintain volume, that's the key. I have this water balloon here to help demonstrate that. When I squash this water balloon down, the volume stays the same as when I stretch it out. There's no more or less water between either of these two poses of this water balloon. That's fun. No matter what its doing, the volume, the amount of water in it stays the same. That should be true of your drawings or whatever medium of animation you're using. Because that will help sell the effect more. Because we don't want something to be, unless it's like the Hulk or something changing size too rapidly. Because it will catch our eye not as a charming quality, but as an error, because we're not used to seeing like things change volume quickly, we're used to things having a volume and keeping them throughout their range of motion. That's a principle, it can be broken of course, but we're talking about sticking to the principals right now so that we understand them. We know when we can break them, that we are breaking them and it's not by accident and we're making a mistake. It's going to catch the viewer's eye in a way that we don't want it to, that will be distracting. We don't want to distract, we want to bring them into our animation. That's why we need to learn these principles. We understand the rationale when someone's watching something we've made, that they're focused on what we want them to be focused on and they're not being distracted by mistakes or errors that they can't articulate. They might not know, hey, the volume change too much here when you squash and stretch the water balloon. Those types of things is what you need to know as animator to achieve appealing animation. It may seem obvious. This may seem like an obvious thing. Like no, I'm not putting water and taking it out when I do this. But we try to translate that into drawing over a long period of time, you're doing many drawings and animation say it's 100 frames. Over time if you're doing a lot of bouncing and squashing and stretching, you can lose track of what the original volume was when you're having to hand draw on the silhouette all the time. Just think about that when you're approaching your own animations. That can hold true for 3D as well. It's a little easier in 3D because you can type in the actual numbers of what you want to scale or squash and stretch it to. Here's an example using Maya. It's a 3D software that's used in the animation industry. Name a movie that you like or a video game you like and probably Maya has been used on it. I've been using it for my entire career and I have other classes on it if you're interested, in learning 3D animation or modeling or rigging, or there's a lot of sides to 3D. But you don't have to follow along with this. I just wanted to show you what it's like in 3D and how precise you can get to make sure that you're maintaining your volumes. Let's take a look at that real quick. Here we are in Autodesk Maya. If I want to squash or stretch this sphere, I can type in a specific value and ensure the opposite axis of the shape is exactly the opposite of the volume change. That way, I know, even though the shape change, the volume is staying the same, just like the water balloon. In drawing, you have to do this visually, so that's why it's important to understand this concept. The most common way to demonstrate the squash and stretch principle is through one of the most popular and famous animation exercises in the world, the bouncing ball. I've animated two bouncing balls, one has squash and stretch and one doesn't. Can you tell which one does? Now that you've had a chance to look at these, is it the left or the right? I'm pretty sure you can tell it's the right. Even though the squash and stretch is only occurring over three frames or about one-tenth of a second, you can tell the difference. That can show you too how little frames can make a huge difference. The same is true of the amount of squash and stretch. In that example, I was only squashing the sphere from a scale of 1-0.8. That's a change of only 20 percent. That is still very noticeable. Even only over just three frames, you could tell a difference. One of the tendencies of once you start learning these principles, is to go overboard with them and really exaggerate them and that can be fun. But I just wanted to show you a very subtle example, which is still fairly obvious when compared to a sphere that doesn't have squash and stretch. It shows that over just a few frames, one-tenth of a second and just a 20 percent difference is a huge difference in our eyes. Even though you're not a trained really animator yet or maybe you are, I don't know. But you can tell that difference just because you are a pro at this. You don't have to know all these animation principles to be able to tell the difference between things. That's the way our audience is going to be too. Now, to be the artist, you have to be able to control those things to show what you want to show. But just keep in mind your audience is going to be able to tell the difference as well, just like you were able to without bouncing ball. Let's begin the assignment and exercise. In the next lesson, we're going to use 2D digital animation with a free online tool to animate a little bouncing water ball. I will see you in the next lesson. 8. Demo + Assignment 3: Welcome to the lesson. In exercise, we're going to do to help learn squash and stretch. We are going to use 2D digital animation and animate a little bouncing water balloon. Don't worry, you don't have to be great at drawing. We're going to use this free online web tool called Brush Ninja. There's also a few other resources in the course PDF if you want to use a different one than we're using in this exercise. You can just follow along with what I'm doing, you could also think of your own example of squash and stretch and animate that instead of the water balloon, so let's get started. Most people have a Wacom tablet that will help quite a bit. I'm just going to use a mouse just to keep things fair. I have a tablet, but I'm not going to use it for this exercise, so I'm going to show you what you can still do with just having a mouse. If you've never seen this program before, one or any animation program, there's a few common features that you can be familiar with, and that's having something to draw with, like a brush. Having a way to control the number of frames that you have and to add frames and move them around, so we have that ability down here, and also onion skinning. Onion skinning means I want to see the frame before and after the one I'm working on, but at a lower opacity so that it's not as overbearing as the drawing I'm working on, so I can tell the difference. That's going to be common between all 2D animation programs that you use, and this program is free and it hasn't. You can choose to support them on Patreon. What we're looking at is the current version. I'm going to switch over to the beta version because that's probably the direction this site's headed in. Just so we're all on the same page, I'm going to switch over to that and create a new project, hit "Okay". We basically have all of our tools up here, and you can switch between those with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and this is the onion icon. All this stuff could change, but I want you to understand the basic layout because it's going to be true if this website changes or you're using something different, there's going to be these common traits that you can look for and find even if they move around on this site. We have our first frame. Let's go ahead and set our settings. We can remove the credit here if you want. I'm a Patreon contributor. I encourage you too as well if you're interested in that, and you can give them credit by leaving that on if you want. The other thing, because now you know, frame rate, we can go ahead and set our frame rate. That's the little speedometer icon down here. Right now, it's set to a frame rate of six, but we know everything has a frame rate of 24 in film, so that's a very common frame rate. But we also know it's very common to animate on 2s, so we have two options. We can either set this to 12 frames per second, so that's like animating on 2s, or we could set this to 24 frames per second. But when we're animating down here, you see this little times one. We could say times two, that means hold it for two frames. Whether we did this or animate on 12 frames per second, it's the same thing. I'm going to animate on 12 frames per second just so I'm not having to hit an extra plus every time I make a new frame, so I'm going to go 12 frames per second. That way, we can leave these at one every time we add a new frame, and that's how you add a new frame. Let's get started by drawing the water balloon first. Let's draw the neutral pose of it just being a water balloon sitting there. I'm going to go over to the shapes here, and I'm going to select a shape, and I'm just going to draw it out. Now, normally in most programs, if you hold down Shift, you can constrain it to be a perfect circle. This is in beta, so I think it's not perfect yet for me. That's okay, water balloons aren't perfect either. I'm also going to change the background real quick, so this is a background icon. I'm going to select a different color and just use a fun purple. Then after the fact, you can also still change the colors of your objects here so I can select it and then just choose a different color, I'm going to use yellow. Now, we have our first frame and we can add the little fun not a bit on top as well by hand. Let's grab the brush and draw that. It's basically like an upside-down triangle, depending on how you look at triangles, and then fill it in. I'm having the mouse button is still held down. The other thing I'm going to do is I'm going to move both of these down because I don't want it in the center. I want more room for it to stretch. Even though I've made mistakes or whatever, it's not that big a deal. I can use the cursor here and just click "Drag", select both of these, and then just pull them down. Cool. Let's move on to the next frame. Let's do the squash frame. I'm going to add a frame. Instead of adding it, let's duplicate it. Let's go back to the first frame and choose "Duplicate". That's the two squares icon here. If you hover over it, it'll show you that's what that is. I'm going to delete the one that's empty. Now, with onion skin on or off, we can't tell the difference because the frames are identical. But as soon as we start to move this, we can see the sphere we had behind that on the other frame, so we can use that as a guide to know where we came from on our new drawing. When we want to squash, we have to remember to keep the volume. When we're drawing it, or in this case, we can manipulate it. If I scale this water balloon down, I need to scale it out in the same amount. If I scale it down this much, I can think, I took away this grayed out yellow volume. I need to add that back in on the sides, so let's add that back in over here in the same amount. Now, I want to go a little more extreme with my squash, so it's very obvious, so I'm going to do it a little bit more. This is the fun of animating is, you don't have to know exactly what you're doing as soon as you start working, you can play, you can figure it out as you're messing around. I want to make sure I grab the whole thing, so I'm going to click and drag and then move it down. Again, we're using the cursor icon over here. Now, just between those two frames, we have a squash. Now, let's make the stretch, so I'm going to duplicate the original just so I know we're staying with the least starting point of the original volume. Let's click and drag the top part and then move that up, I'm just going to move it totally all the way so we can just deal with this. It's going to stretch this up. Again, because we're stretching, we're adding volume so we need to take it away from somewhere else, and that's from the sides. I'm going to take it away from the sides in equal measure and ask myself, I'm going to go to this middle frame so we can see them overlapping each other, is the amount of volume I'm adding here the same amount that I took away from the sides here? I think it's pretty close. Those are basically the only poses we need to do a squash and stretch exercise. We can have a little more fun with this and make it into a dancing, what I would call a dancing water balloon. Let's have it go out to the side, so I'm going to select both of these. I'm going to rotate it using the top little handle here, and you can actually rotate it, and I'm going to re-center it so that the point of contact is in the center is going to be the same. I'm going to duplicate this one, and I'm going to do the same thing, but for the other side. I'm going to rotate this, and then go over here, and they're going back and forth about the same amount of rotation, and again, I center it backup here. Now, the one thing I want to do on the squash is make this a bit more three-dimensional and squashing because we just flattened it. But if you watch this thing, there's a bit more on the bottom than there is on the top, so let's add that with the brush. I'm going to take a brush, and I'm just going to brush here and add some to the side. Now, as I'm adding this, you could also ask yourself, well, shouldn't I be taking it away from somewhere? You would be right. We could do that with the Eraser tool or we could scale down the oval that we already have. I think I want to try to scale down the oval just a little bit more, and then I want to click "Drag" just that top piece and then bring that down a little bit more. It looks a bit more, there's more volume on the bottom because we're also dealing with gravity. If I play that back, it's going to be very fast, and it's dancing pretty wildly. But what I want to do is loop this, so it goes squash to one side stretch, squash to another side stretch, and it does that over and over. What I can do is duplicate the squash and put it in between the two stretch poses and do the same thing for the neutral pose, and this neutral pose would be considered like an in-between. It's helping marry the two extreme poses, so I'm duplicating that and I'm putting it on either side so that it has somewhere to go from here to here would be too big of a jump from stretch to squash, we don't want to do that. We want to have a little bit of an in-between so it doesn't flicker. Otherwise, it's going to look a bit flickery and strobey to our eyes. This is only a few drawings, only a few minutes, and we have a whole dancing water balloon. What you could do too is add a little highlight to give it a little reflection to make it look more of a water balloon. Let's grab a white and just give each one of these drawings a little reflection here to help indicate the rubbery nature of our water balloon. You can hit "Undo" if you make a mistake, Command Z. Now, we have a little highlight there on the water balloon. The other thing you can do, I mentioned this earlier, if we wanted to hold these frames a little bit, we could. Instead of having to actually redo the drawing, but you just say plus two. I'm going to do that on the extreme poses, so we spend a little more time at the extremes because to change direction takes a lot of energy, and to change direction quickly can be a little jarring to the eye. So when we make those big changes, it might feel better to have just a little bit more time on those extreme poses, and you can play around with that, and that's really fun about that. This effect here on the frames is, I didn't have to spend all that time redoing the drawing to actually hold that for another frame to test the new timing that I was interested in. If we wanted to export this, all we have to do is just go up to "Export", and it gives us options to use as an ANIMATED GIF, or GIF if you're one of those people. Choose ANIMATED GIF, will ask me where to save it, and we're good to go. As we go through the course, we're going to get a little bit more complicated with the tools I show you. By the end of the course, you're going to be able to add and combine and arrange all these ingredients of the principles of animation in the way that you want to, to make something super appealing. So stay tuned for the next principle of animation in the next lesson. Thanks for watching, and I hope you share what you make. I want to see these bouncing and dancing water balloons or any other example that you came up with, like our muscles. I don't have a lot, but I could do this, and that's the squash and this is the stretch. Get to animating and show me what you make. See you in the next lesson. 9. Slow In & Out: Our next principle we're going to learn is slow in and slow out, otherwise known as ease in and ease out. It's basically a reflection of Newton's first law of motion. We're going to get into a little more science and physics here. But it basically says, "An object at rest tends to stay at rest and an object in motion tends to stay in motion unless another force acts on it." In our case, living on earth and being a human, those forces are typically gravity, friction, and in animation, you could have the forces of another character or object. We need to route our animation and motion in familiar forces, even if we're going to caricature them, because their eyes are used to seeing things move in a certain way, and when they break those rules, it can be a bit jarring and distracting as opposed to charming and inviting. Even Walt Disney said that our work has to have a foundation of fact in order to have sincerity. What that means is, it just needs to reflect what we're used to seeing to some degree, even if we're going to caricature or exaggerate it. Because we're used to seeing things move in a certain way based on the real-world physics that we live in and expect to see in motion of objects. What that means in practical terms, if you're animating in 2D drawing, I mean there would be more drawings or if it stop motion, there'd be more pictures, or in CGI animation, there would be more frames or more poses at the beginning of a motion as opposed to the middle of the motion. If it will slow in and slow out and be more poses at the beginning or more pictures at the beginning and the end, so the middle would be the fastest area and that would be covering the most distance for that object. From a stationary position, I'm just going to move it in real time. It would look like this. It starts slow and then speeds up and then slows down again. That's how we expect things to move. If you consider a car, for example, there's some, it has to overcome the friction on the ground, the weight of itself or gravity, and it's a measure of how fast the car is, how quickly it can get to 0-60 thing. But there is a slow out no matter how fast the car is. It can't just completely shoot off like the speed of light. Things have to overcome these physical forces, and so that's what we can reflect in our animations to give it that authentic feel and appeal. Now if you animate without this principle in mind, it can make your animations look quite robotic because robots move in a more linear fashion and the instant torque of electronic motors allows them to overcome those initial forces that we aren't used to seeing as much. I'm moving a bit more fluidly, but if I was a robot, it's a bit more jerky motion and that's linear thing. If I was to do the same example with this little toy, even the entire time, it wouldn't speed up or slow down from the first time it moves. It would be the same speed. Now even if you slow that down, because I'm a human moving it, you'd be able to tell that I was slower at the beginning and slower at the end because I'm trying to start the weight of my own arm, even from going. Let alone the weight of this. It can be important to know that to avoid robotic looking things or to embrace it like I animated robots on the one of the transformers movies. It's important to know when you can break these rules and intentionally lean into breaking them. One of the most common exercise in animation to help sell this principle is a character lifting a weight. That's because the weight is imaginary, we have to put that weight into the object through these principles. One of the main ways is ease in and ease out because a heavier object will take a lot more force to overcome gravity or that object's mass. If I was to pretend that this object was really heavy, I would do a lot of different body maybe motions, but ours will get straight. I'd pull, let it go very slow. If this thing was very light, like it is, I would just do this and it would feel light and it would look light. When you're animating, it's all made up, you have to mimic those actions to make it feel heavy or light. Let's take a look at the bouncing ball example one more time. But instead of on the left side, it having no squash and stretch, we're going to have it have no ease in and ease out or slow in and slow out. Can you see how the left ball feels robotic and feels as though there's no weight to it. But the ball on the right, at the top of it's bounce, it slows into the top position as gravity slowly overtakes its motion upward to begin slowly pulling it down again, or to slow it out back into that falling motion. A mistake to look out for when you're starting to do these types of exercises in a bouncing ball, what I see a lot of time is, students having just learned this principle and doing a bouncing ball test will actually slow a ball down on impact. Now the ball doesn't know that it's coming close to the ground. We have to think about why would it slow down? The force acting on it is consistent and it's gravity. If there was no table there or floor there, it would just keep falling until it reaches terminal velocity like you do on skydiving. It would just keep falling until that falling is interrupted by the ground, which is hopefully not like skydiving. Just because you're starting to grasp this principle, doesn't mean it needs to be applied to every situation like that falling ball example or any falling object, really. It will continue to speed up until it reaches terminal velocity unless something intercepts or interrupts that falling. When something is falling to the ground, it just keeps speeding up, it doesn't decide on getting close to the ground and slow down. That doesn't make sense. Look out for stuff like that and really start to wrap your head around this principle in the context of exercises like that. One term you might hear, an animation and especially in regards to slow in and slow out or ease in and ease out, is the term spacing. Spacing refers to the amount of distance between each pose basically. Let's take a look at the bouncing ball example one more time, just so that we can learn this new term as well, and how that applies to this principle. If you look back at the bouncing ball on the left, it has even or linear spacing. The speed stays the same on the way up and on the way down, which means the distance between each pose is the exact same. That's even spacing. That's just not physically correct in this case. It's also boring to watch. Even spacing doesn't help communicate the weight of the object. It feels quite robotic as well. Because the ball on the left is even spacing, you might think the ball on the right is uneven spacing, but that's not the case. The ball on the right has a gradual, incremental, consistent change as it slows in to the top and slows out. What uneven spacing means is that it has an inconsistent distance between each frame. Instead of a gradual change, it could be a big change and then a small change and then a bigger change in the last one it had, and then a smaller one than the third. There's no consistency to the motion so it can feel quite erratic. It can happen sometimes in animation when you are having a hard time keeping track of more complicated animations like character animation, when there's a lot more moving pieces. In the next lesson, let's do our first stop motion animation exercise and get a little practice using ease in and ease outs or slow in and slow outs. I'll see you in the next lesson. 10. Demo + Assignment 4: Welcome to the slow in and slow out assignment lesson, where we are going to use stop motion animation for the first time in this course. If you want to follow along with the stop motion, you can, if you don't and you want to use one of the other mediums we've already discussed, then you're free to do that as well. If you want to follow along with the stop motion, we are going to need a camera. In this case I'm using my iPhone and we need an app. There's many stop motion apps out there, but I'm using one called Stop Motion Studio. It's free. It's on iPhone and Android. I encourage you to get that app. We also need a tripod because when you're starting out doing stop motion, you want to have the camera stationary. You don't want to be moving the camera around a lot or even trying to do handheld. Do not do that. Because your camera will be moving more than the thing you're trying to animate and it'll be hard to watch. You want to be able to have your camera stationary and you need a tripod for that. You can make a tripod out of a lot of different things. Just to demonstrate that, I found some Chip Clips here. I can actually just clip the corners, and that does a pretty good job of setting up a nice old tripod for me. I'm going to try to record the screen here. It keeps not wanting to record the screen. Let's open up the app now. Now we're in Stop Motion Studio. I'm going to click "Create New Movie" here. What we're going to do is we are going to animate this Post-it Note here. This is going to be the ground. We need one other one which is going to be the one that's going to be animated. Let's just move it straight above this one a certain distance that makes sense for our camera here. Move the camera into place, and once it's in place, I don't want to touch it. Now we're going to also use the timer feature here. I'm going to click this little camera button here to go into the camera and click the timer button here and turn on a timer. It'll automatically take a picture for me so I don't have to click and touch the camera, which can move the camera itself. I'm going to do 10 seconds. If my hand gets in the way and I missed the 10-second mark, I can just delete that frame later. Another thing to notice is on the left side you have the onion skin. If you leave it in the middle it will show the frame before it. Because we haven't started, it's not showing the frame before and so let's get started. We need to do slow out, meaning, we want to move the first frame as little as we can, basically because that's going to set up the rest of the animation. Because each time we move the Post-it Note, it needs to go further and further until it hits the ground. When it comes back up on the bounce, it's going to have that same energy. It's going to hit and come back up with the same kind of spacing until we get to the apex and it's going to slow down again up here and speed up, slow down, speed up, slow down. That's ease in and ease out or slow in and slow out. Let's get started. When I hit the first picture, I'm going to try to get out of the way of the camera of the app and let it take a first picture and get ready to rumble. There we go. I'm going to move it a little bit because this is the slow out. Then trying to get out of the way as quick as I can as well. Each time you move it, it needs to be more distance than the last one. That will give that gradual motion of the easing out and the more you move it, the more you can take advantage of the onion skin feature here to see how much you move the last one. The bare minimum, go that far again. But really, I need to go much further than the last picture. Probably going to go pretty far on this one. Then have the next one will be the one that hits the ground. Lining it up with the ground, and then we're going to bounce back up. Again, do not do a slow out here. It has a ton of energy because it picked up speed going down. It still has that speed as it goes up until gravity takes effect. We're going to move it a little less this time than the previous move and then maybe a half Post-it Note of a distance. Then maybe half again. Doing halves is a good way to gradually do less and less and then you just keep halving the distance. It's a nice little trick. When you're having to do this visually, it can get difficult. We'll just do one bounce in this exercise, but I encourage you to do more bounces. I'm just going to stop that and try and do maybe three bounces on your exercise. I'm going to go back and make sure I'm not in the way of any of those and I'm going to hit "Play" here. It has a nice ease out of the first motion and the bounce and ease in to the top of the bounce as well. That's the principle at play using a new medium of animation, stop motion animation. Hopefully, you found that useful, and I look forward to seeing you in the next lesson. 11. Anticipation: The next principle of animation we're going to learn in this lesson is anticipation. If there was a theme to all of these principles, I would say it's a theme of clarity and anticipation would be at the top of that list, in prioritizing clarity and your animation, making sure your audience knows what's happening. Anticipation is an action before the main action that calls attention to the subject so that the viewer knows something is about to happen. Without anticipation, the viewer might not register the action you're animating at all or as well as they could if you had added some anticipation. Some common examples of anticipation that are physically required to do the action are things like throwing or kicking a ball and swinging a bat or golf club because you can't perform those actions if you don't first do the opposite of the direction of the main motion. For me to throw a baseball or any kind of ball, I need to wind up my arm backwards in the motion that I'm going to be headed. I need to go backward before I go forward and throw the ball. That's a common physical requirement, I can't throw a ball by just doing that. That's more like pushing a ball. There are physical requirements to some motions that they require anticipation. One other common example that falls in this category is jumping. Let's take a look at me out in the woods jumping on a log. For this example of anticipation, we're going to look at a simple jump. If I was to not anticipate the jump, I couldn't jump on top of this log. No anticipation means going from straight leg, it's just physically impossible. When you're looking at character animation, you have to think of what the character can actually physically do to make the motion look believable. This also can apply to motion graphics and whatnot because anticipation also tells the viewer that they're about to do something, so you pay attention to it before the action occurs. If I was to just jump straight from here, your eyes wouldn't be ready for it. Just for me to physically be able to do it, I have to anticipate that jump, which for a jump means going down before I go up. If I was to try to jump with no anticipation, I just physically couldn't do it, but if I anticipate it, I go down and now I can jump. You can use this principle in all different ways in your animation, hope that helps. Anticipation is also referred to as an antic, that's slang for anticipation, so you might hear that term thrown around. You might need more antic or do less antic on this motion. That's just something to be aware of as you get into animation more. We've seen that anticipation can be physically required of an action to perform that action, but it can also be used in the animators toolkit just to call attention to something so that the viewer can register that's about to occur. That way, the audience will know the action is about to happen, and then they can sit back and enjoy the way it happens. That's a big distinction. We want to make sure that we're not doing things that the audience can't see, and anticipation is a way to signal to the audience that something is about to occur to look over here. Anticipation can also be used to convey a sense of emotion or the mental state of a character, if you're doing character animation. Anticipations don't always have to be big and obvious, like bringing your arm back to throw a baseball. They can be very, very subtle. They could be only a few frames, just like how squash and stretch, which was only just three frames. An antic could be very short, very small, but it just helps just that little bit more to call attention to something or to help convey an emotional state of a character. Let's take a look at a couple of examples of head-turn. The first is going to be no antic, the second is going to be a small antic, and the third is going to be a big antic. Here is me acting. First, we have no antic, that communicates surprise or urgency. Next, we have a very small antic, which signals the head is about to turn and it's a more neutral state of the character. Finally, we have a really big antic, that's a bit slow, which shows a heightened emotional state of the character. With this example, we also showed that anticipation can be used to convey a sense of the emotional state of a character. Unlike the first example, that we watched, anticipation can be excluded from the animation intentionally, in the cases of surprise or an urgent moment for the character or if we're intentionally trying to surprise the audience, but those are very limited cases. Normally, we want to make sure the audience is coming along on the ride with us in our animation and they're aware of what's happening. But it is a time-honored gag to build anticipation and then, not pay it off. Anticipate one action and then have a surprise of something else totally different happening. That's one way to keep it interesting as well for the audience, and a nice tweak to using anticipation to build suspense and then not pay off what you're expecting to happen. It'd be like me raring back to throw a baseball, and I'm really raring back, and then a baseball falls out the ceiling and hits me on the head or something. In this lesson, we learned what anticipation was and that sometimes it's referred to as an antic. We learned that anticipation can be physically required of a motion. We also learned that it could be used to convey an emotional state of a character just depending on how much and how little or at all that you use the antic. We also discussed the building of expectations and breaking those down using anticipation in an interesting way to create a surprise, if that's what you're going for as well. In the next lesson, we're going to use this principle and we're actually going to build on the previous two that we've already learned, and add that to our repertoire of the animation we're going to do for a pair of scissors. I will see you in the next lesson where we will animate these scissors. 12. Demo + Assignment 5: Welcome to the lesson for the anticipation or antic principle. We're going to create a stop motion animation with scissors, that incorporates all three of the principles we've learned so far. We're building on each one and we're adding and creating a bit more complicated of an animation each time. I like stop motion for these tests because we're not having to worry about being good at drawing and that being the limiting factor of us testing out these principles. That's why I'm favoring stop motion for this one as well and I am using scissors for this. We also need a stack of books for a tripod. If you don't have a tripod, I'm continuing to try to show you that you don't need fancy equipment to be able to do this stuff. I'm using a stack of books to be able to shoot the camera down, where we will be animating the scissors and I'm going to use the potato chip clip to help attach the phone to the book, so I can extend the phone out over the book a little ways without it tipping over. Once we have that setup, we can look through the camera down here. But we need to plan out what we're animating. Especially with stop motion animation, you need to plan it out because there's no undo button with stop motion animation. You are moving physical objects in the real world and there's no undo. We need to know what we're doing first, and my idea for this lesson is to animate the scissors like they are a fish in water and it is swimming away. We want to anticipate the motion of its swimming away, by going backwards first. We're going to incorporate the other two principles by easing in or slowing in to the anticipation and then slowing out a little bit faster than we slowed in, and also slowing in on the anticipation of the scissors opening. We want to make sure we're slowing into that motion and then as we swim away, we want to go faster on the slower out, to the acceleration of its swimming. We're going to anticipate the scissors back as they open as well, which is basically a squash position now, so we're incorporating the first principle, and then we're going to slow out but much quicker. That means fewer frames, fewer pictures in stop motion. As this closes, it's going to accelerate forward. We're going to ease out of that as well, but it's going to be fairly quick. There's not going to be a ton of frames there. Let's get started. Now that we have this Stop Motion Studio app open, I'm going to press "New Movie" and I'm touching very lightly. Even though this is set up decently, I don't want to knock anything over in the middle of animating something. I still want to be very gentle here. The other thing to keep in mind is, I don't want to be in the shadow. You can see right here, my hand is creating a bit of a shadow even when it's off frame of the phone camera. When I take a picture, I want to make sure I'm consistent in where I am when I take the picture, so that there's not a lot of flickering and shadows going on there. I want to be able to stage this up first. I want to have enough room here that I can go backwards before I go forwards. I don't want it right in the dead center, but I want it a little bit back so we can see where we're headed here, and we have some room to go backwards first. I'm going to position myself, so that I can get in a good position to start taking photos. I'm going to click the camera button here and then I'm not going to use the timer this time, I'm going to make sure the onion skin is about halfway there. Now, we can take our first photograph. We want the first position, the stationary position and I'm going to take a couple of photos here. Because it takes a few frames for your eyes to register something happening, especially at the beginning or end of a cut. Now that we have a couple of images, let's start with the anticipation, but we want to ease into it. I'm going to just move the scissors back, just the least amount that I possibly can move them and take another photo. Then I'm going to move them about twice that much again. We're basically matching the blue on the black of the inside of the handles there, so I can take a mental note of how far I moved that one. I want to go further than that and I want to start opening up the scissors. Let's open the scissors a little bit as we move this back. I'm going to go a little bit further and then we can start easing into this as the scissors open as well. The other thing we can start incorporating is rotation. I'm intentionally choosing this object because it's very slowly incorporating more things to move. When you're animating a character, you're animating at least 12 things at once. All these different joints that make up a character. With this we have position, where it is, we have rotation of the whole thing and it can open and close. Part of the antic could be a bit of rotation. It's ramping up like this, like a J shape or like a Nike swoop. We could also start to rotate it here, in this motion a little bit. I'm going to just barely do that and you also have to start thinking, how much am I easing in on the translation? How much am I easing in on the rotations? Because those are two different things and you have to keep track of those. We've opened it a little bit. We have a further position and we start to rotate it. I'm going to rotate it a little bit more, but I'm going to start easing into the translation. The rotation is just getting started, so it's going to finish after the translation stops on the ease in. I need to open scissors more, because we're really getting into the middle of this antic now. Now I'm going to start to slow down the rotation and start to really bring out the scissors here. I'll make sure I'm tracking the right scissor. I was looking at the wrong blade here. Another good thing to keep in mind is the blue dots. We're going to actually go back here and see where we're at right now. I can hit "Play". It's a good start. That rotation is maybe a little bit much, and it's going down, but that's okay. It's just something to keep in mind. This doesn't have to be perfect, it's a learning process. Don't get too precious with your animation as you're animating, otherwise, you will stunt your progress because you'll be too worried to do anything. It's not the end of the world. We're not doing brain surgery here. No one's going to get hurt, hopefully. These are scissors, be careful, but keep it in perspective what we're doing here so that you don't get too precious with what you're doing and too nervous to try something, because then what's the point? I'll rotate this a little more. I'm easing it on the rotation, and I'm almost stopped the translation backward. I'm really favoring opening the scissors more. It's just a lot of back and forth looking at the onion skin for me. I'm going to start to move this just very, very little now. Once we get on this slow in and slow out, the smallest changes is going to make the biggest difference. I'm really doing next to nothing here because I want to have a bit of a hold at the back of the antic so that we can really appreciate this fish is really building up some energy for this push off here. I'm actually going to take two frames there, and then I'm going to start the slow out of the fins or the scissors coming down. I want to make sure the center's blue part is staying where it's supposed to be. Do a bit of an ease in here. I'm probably only going to do two frames here, and start the acceleration right here, and really push it off there. Now, I'm really watching the blue dot here to see that I'm remembering the distance I did on the last one and also rotating it in a more straight trajectory now. Now, I'm going to the distance of the handles. I know I need to at least do that one more time probably before it starts to slow down, and it needs to swim again. But the original idea was to get it off screen so I can maybe have another frame or two of acceleration before I start decelerating it or slow in. Now, I'm going to start to slow the scissors down as it goes off frame because as we know, swing under water, one stroke only goes so far. Now, we're totally off. I'm going to do a couple more frames there so that it has a nice ending. Let's play this back. Let's go back to the mainframe here. Now, we have an antic, we know something's about to happen, and we opened up for a squash position, we eased into it, and then we did a bit of a quicker ease out or a slow out. The antic is the buildup of the energy, and the main motion is going to be the release of that energy. So it should be a bit quicker. I could probably get away with maybe even deleting one picture or two pictures here on the acceleration away. Let's take a look at maybe what I could get rid of. I almost think I can get rid of this one. I'm going to cut it and see how that plays back. That has a much better feel to it. To me, it's a bit snappier, and it creates more contrast between the anticipation and the main motion. We just created a much more complicated stop-motion animation, rotating the object, moving the object, and also doing a squash and stretch pose by opening and closing the scissors. This has been a super fun lesson for me. Because honestly, I start these and I don't know what you're going to get. It's not like I'm marking anything here to know exactly where to put this thing out. I'm doing this with you and I hope you will as well, and I hope you share what you're creating with me. If you choose to do something else besides a scissors, like some tool out of a tool belt, or a chest, or a hammer, or who knows what, you could use anything. I'd love to see what you make and share with me in the course discussion or the questions and answer area. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 13. Overlapping & Secondary Action: In this one lesson, we're going to cover two principles of animation and that's because they can sometimes get confused together, and they are overlapping action and secondary action. They're two totally different things. But we're going to start with overlapping action so we can be able to tell the difference between the two principles of animation. As the Disney animators began animating and discovering these principles, this one stood out when they found that when they were animating their characters and they animated them coming to a stop, they found that it felt too rigid and unnatural, and they used this principle to create more natural movement. This principle basically says that not everything stops at the same time, so when we're walking and we come to a stop or something, not all pieces of our body stop or even start when we start walking at this exact same time and so there's overlapping action. That's where the name overlap comes in because different pieces of the body or subject overlap with the other. So some may come to a rest before the others or some may start moving before the others. So taking advantage of this principle means that you can create a lot more natural and fluid movement. If we want to get into the science of why that is, is because of something called kinetic energy, and that basically means by the virtue of something moving, it has built up energy, and it takes time for that to settle to a stop or even start to create that energy. Because of a different objects, mass, or friction or all these other variables, they can start and stop or take longer time to start and stop. Let's take a look at a couple of examples. Let's begin with this jump and spin. Because the athlete spun and lands on one foot doesn't mean the motion stops when his foot hits the ground. His body still has the force of the spin and that kinetic energy and the rays like continues to spin as an example of follow through from the energy of their original spin motion. When he does stop, we can also observe another animation term related to this principle of overlapping action, the term is overshoot, which means the object goes past its final rest pose and then comes back. It overshoots it. Because his body has weight, we can see he goes down or overshoots his final rest pose before he extends his legs and up into a more neutral rest pose. But we can still see that despite his waist stopping from moving, that his arms continue to move is another example of overlapping action. This can apply not just to people's bodies but also clothes and accessories like earrings that swing long after the person has stopped moving. At an animation conference, I once heard the famous Disney animator, Eric Goldberg, referred to this principle as adding flouts to an animation. He was doing a demonstration about how a jumping character's dress would drag behind the character and then at the peak of the jump, it would catch up and add this, what he would describe as flouts. I've never heard that term before. So you're always learning in animation and everyone sometimes can have their own way of describing the same motion. In motion graphics, it can be used to create an authentic and fun field to the motion like these examples, where the cloth drags behind the ball it's draped over and the overlapping of the springs wobbling after the ball passes through them. Let me just remind you that these principles aren't some old, dusty, throwback thing that is never used these days. I actually used it when I animated on Disney's 2019 remake of Aladdin. I was hired late in the production and so I was helping them final some shots. Some of those shots included the monkey character in the film, Abu. In some of these shots, most of them, he came to a stop. He would scurry along and then come up next to a Aladdin or come into his rest pose for that scene and he has a tail. His tail is quite springy and that was part of my job was to add the overlapping action of his tail for when he comes to a stop so that it looked realistic to that monkey character. In that case, it was photo realistic so I needed to take that into account when I was using reference to figure out what's the weight of this tail based on the size of this monkey, how fast it was moving and the appeal in keeping the shape, that nice curled look of the tail. So that's something to keep in mind that these things I use every day. Let's get into the second animation principle for this lesson, secondary action, that can sometimes get confused with this first principle we talked about overlapping action because they both have action in their name, and they also happened secondary to the main motion. But in the case of overlapping action, we've learned that's due to the kinetic motion, the kinetic energy that needs to be settled or started and how that is offset or overlaps with the main action in different pieces of the body move and stop at different times because of kinetic motion. Now, secondary action has to do with the actual performance choices and helping to convey the emotional state of the character. What I mean by that is take for example someone who's angry and they're going to stand up angrily from a desk or a chair, and the main motion is them standing up. But how can we add a little more believability into that performance to show his emotional state? We might shake his head as he stands up like a quick little shake. The secondary action is his head shake, the main motion is his body moving. He may have overlapping action and other principles may be at play as well, but secondary action is specifically about adding texture to your animation. What that means is adding that extra charming quality and specific acting choices for a character performance. It has less application to something like motion graphics and it's very much specific about a character performance animation. Sometimes these choices come later as the shot progresses and animators realized the need to find a way to plus the shot and that's another term you might hear quite often is trying to figure out a way to plus your work, or you might be working in a studio and get someone else's work, maybe they left the project and it's now your job to plus their work. So you have to start to think about and find interesting ways and interesting choices that's authentic to the character and a performance in a way that supports the main action. The secondary action is never meant to be overtaking the main performance. If it does, then it's no longer a secondary action. It should always be subordinate and support the main action. An example of that from my career has been working on the movie Welcome to Marwen. I was an animator on that show and the actor, Steve Carell, was opening a door for his love interest. That movie was shot with motion capture, which means the characters were on a stage with suits on and their motions were recorded and they were given to us, as animators, to apply to the CG or the computer-generated characters. In this one performance, he opened the door for his love interest, his love interest walked past him and inside the door, and that's the end of the scene. The motion capture data got that fairly well. There's other details to that, they were too technical to discuss here that I had to deal with, but in general that performance worked great. But part of my job as an animator is to find ways to plus these things when appropriate, and one of the things I put forward as an idea to my animation director was for Steve Carell to not just open the door but as she passes him, for him to take his hat off and put it on to his chest lovingly and longingly as she walks past him. Now, the main motion was him opening the door and my idea for secondary action was trying to convey that she's his love interest, and what's something that I could do that didn't involve him talking, just a very simple gesture that supported the main motion of him opening the door, and it also communicated his feelings towards her. Keep in mind, these principles are not only in textbooks, I use these every day in my work. In this lesson, we learned overlapping action, also known as follow through, is about the overlapping action of motions that can arise from kinetic energy of objects needing to come to a rest or beginning to move. Then we learned about how secondary action is also another animation principle and separate from overlapping action even though they sound a little bit similar. Secondary action is about supporting the character performance with smaller choices that helps support and are subordinate to the main action. In the next lesson, we're going to actually have an assignment where we animate a fish eating another fish, and we're going to use both of these animation principles at the same time on the same animation so you can tell the difference between them even more. So I'll see you there. Thanks for watching. 14. Demo + Assignment 6: In this lesson assignment, I'm going to demonstrate the last two animation principles we discussed, overlapping action and secondary action. I'm going to use a bit more of a technical program to do that called Adobe After Effects. Now, if you're uncomfortable using that software, you've never heard of it, that's okay. You can still follow along and learn something here. You can also take some of my other classes that teach After Effects to beginners, but there's still something that you can gain from following along and watching these principles at work and see how they're applied. You can also recreate this animation yourself using stop motion, or drawing, or one of the other ways of using claymation. There's a lot of different ways you could recreate this yourself if you don't want to use a computer to do this. I'm providing a project file that already has the main actions animated, so all we're going to do is just focus on these two principles in this lesson. If you're curious, I made the artwork in Procreate. Maybe in the future I'll also have courses on Procreate as well, which is a fun tool, and you can also use that for animating. The main action is done for you, which is a fish eating another fish, and it's going to loop. What we want to do is add overlapping action and secondary action. The overlapping action is going to be the tentacle, the little distracting, glowy orb light that he find on anglerfish. When the fish moves, there needs to be overlapping action applied to it, meaning it's going to react after the main motion and settle on its own time and terms. The other principle we're going to apply is secondary action. Now with a fish eating another fish, what's a way that we could plus the animation of that? The way that I thought about it was we could animate the tongue, licking his lips before he opens his mouth to bite. It's still a secondary action subordinate to the main action of him eating the actual fish. It's not too distracting. It supports the idea that he's hungry and he's about to eat, so just adds that extra little something to make it a secondary action at work. Let's get started in After Effects. I've created this file. If you are familiar with After Effects, you might be more comfortable dealing with this, but let me just explain what I set up real quick. The only two layers you're going to see initially are the two that you need to work with. If you hit U on your keyboard, you can pull up the keyframes that are currently on there. Let me just play through the animation real quick so you can see part of what we're going to be doing. The little fish comes in, he wakes up, licks his lips, eats the fish. Now, the licking I've animated, I'm going to delete that so that you can animate that. The one I'm going to demonstrate in this is the overlapping action of the tentacle and how to animate a little bit in After Effects. But if you did want to dig a little bit deeper into this scene, I hid the layers that you can see here with the little shy layer here. If you click this little shy icon, you'll get all the other keyframes and fun stuff I spent time doing and analyze the animation a little bit more. But to keep it focused and clear about what the assignment is about, I put those on shy layers as they're called in After Effects so that we can just focus on the tongue and the tentacle. Again, if you hit U, you can pull up the keyframes, and the tentacle is going to be animated with the Puppet tool effect. There's basically only two pins we're going to have to animate for that. We've got the one at the apex and the one at the point. Now, let me just walk you through the animation I did real quick so you can see some of these animation principles we've already learned at work. We have the main action, fish eats another fish. Well, how do we do that in a more appealing way? If it just opens his mouth and eats it, it's not very appealing, so I added some anticipation. Part of that anticipation was also squash and stretch, and I added squash and stretch on the eye. If you watch the eye blink open, there's squash and stretch. Because it's only two drawings there, I wanted to add a little more motion by squash and stretching the two drawings I did have, and the same on the antic, the fish squashes and stretches. You can also see the overlapping action on the fish's fins. Look at the bottom there. As he starts to go backward, his fins go back, he also squashes and stretches there, and then he moves forward. There's no more anticipation there because I didn't want the attack to be a bit quick. There was that slow anticipation in and then the quick attack, but there's still squash and stretch here and through here, the whole drawing. Because this is only two drawings for the whole body as well, it's an open mouth and a closed mouth, so add a little extra motion. You can add the squash and stretch on there, it adds a lot more squishy feeling to it, a life-like feeling to it. Then the fish goes back into rest pose. Again, we can see overlapping action on the fins. As the fish goes back, the fins, because of the friction of the water, are also going to get pulled backward and then they're going to come to a rest. That's overlapping action again. Seeing where the fish bodies coming to a stop and the fins are still moving, so that's overlapping action as well. It's already applied here out quite a bit. Again, the secondary action that we add is the tongue. I'm going to let you animate this. You can see where I put my keyframes here, but I'm going to delete those for the project file so you have to do those yourself. But I will include the final end thing as well so if you just want to open up the end animation, but the start one won't have this. I animated rotation and position, not on the same keyframe. Things are happening on different frames. It's rotating, you can see the rotation keyframe here, before the translation keyframe. Then there's ease in and ease out applied to these keyframes as well, which is another animation principle we've covered. That's on a Mac using Function F9, or if you're in a Windows just F9. Right click on one of these icons of the keyframe, you go to keyframe assistant and choose easy ease through the menu. You can also choose keyframe velocity and gaining more specific about the percentage of incoming velocity and now going velocity that you want to add to those eases. This little button over here is also the Graph Editor. It shows you the values chartered over time. This is a very important thing to learn and understand because it's a part of every animation software basically. It's basically just a value change over time. It's as simple as that. That represents the keyframes we see over here. Let's get started animating the tentacle and its overlapping action. Now, the main one I'm concerned about isn't this, even though there is motion here. Because it's attached to the body that's squashes and stretches, it is also getting that treatment of squashing and stretching. So if I wanted to get very particular, I could maybe use this Puppet Pin to hold this in place on every frame, but that would be more time-consuming than we have time for this lesson. I want to focus on is the overlapping action we'll find after this big movement because the fish is the driver of the force, and the tentacle and orb is along for a ride and so they shouldn't be moving at the same time. The tentacle should be following the body, so the body moves first, tentacle should move after it. Right now, they're all moving together, and that's what we need to break up with overlapping action. Let's get to where the main motion of the byte begins, and we'll set a keyframe on these two Puppet Pins. Command arrow, and I believe it's Control arrow on a PC, are how you frame by frame go through in animation. I can get on the exact frame where that begins and I can tick these little icons over here to set a keyframe. We have a keyframe now on where we know we want to start the overlapping action from, and I'm going to go to where the motion begins to stop. That's around in here. We can see the orb stops its forward movement right here. This is where I want to bring it back because it shouldn't stop at the same time as the body. I want to go to that end pose. I'm going to bring both of these puppet pens further back because it should be dragging behind much more because the body's what's forcing it forward. I'm going to go forward a little bit, and then I'm going to copy and paste these keyframes because we want this to loop. We want the animation to continue and keep looping. We want to make sure that the end keyframes are the exact same as the beginning ones. I always like to copy paste those in as reference points as well to make sure I'm not going too far off what the end pose is eventually going to be. We have this end pose and I know I want to go past it because again, overlapping action tends to mean that the kinetic energy isn't just going to all of a sudden going to stop. It's going to go pass the rest position and back and forth until it comes to settle. Knowing this as the end pose now, I know as soon as I go pass this, that will be a good overlap or follow through of going past where I know the final rest position is going to be. I'm bringing the apex down a little bit so that the tentacle can extend out, and then I'm going to copy and paste that final rest pose back in. Again, I have the finish line in mind of where I can again go past that finish line in the other direction. Now bring the apex of this tentacle up. We're going to get this back and forth swinging motion until it comes to a stop. I'm going to go a few frames forward and then I'm going to paste in the final position again. This is not going to look that great. I can already tell you, but it gives us these mile markers of where our keyframes poses should be. I can see that this animation, these keyframes here, if I hit plus, I can zoom in here. If we look at the spacing, if you remember about spacing, I can keep track of the orbs here another orbs here, and I'm moving my mouse cursor to keep track of that distance. It should continue moving here, this is where it gets stuck. Now I know I need to move these key in a way and on this frame, it's going to keep moving. Now we've got it to a point where you can actually follow through correctly, and I'm going to easy ease those by hitting function F9 or F9 if you're on a PC. I'm going to play that first one back now. Now we have the first one working. Then I'm just going to easy ease these last two just to see if that gets us pretty close to what we want. I mean, that's the general idea. You don't have to do a ton more than that to have the principle be applied. If we wanted to take this just a little bit further, we could add a few more overlaps. Each one should be less than the one before it because we're losing that kinetic energy every time the orb passes its finishing point, it should slowly come to a stop. It shouldn't go further than the last overlap it just did. It should always go less and less and less. We can just keep adding those until it feels about the right amount of settle. I'm just going to add a couple more by copying and pasting the end pose in here, and then going back to this one knowing that that is going to now be an overlap keyframe. I just want to go just a little bit, and then I'm going to easy ease these keyframes here, and it's going to be a bit more of a nicer settle. Again, we can retime these just by clicking and dragging these out if we feel that it's a bit too fast. That feels pretty good. Again, you can do more and add more and even have a follow-through or an overlap on as the fish goes back. This should actually drag here. This should extend out here. I have both selected, so I'm just going to click down here anywhere just so I can get back to selecting a single one. It should drag behind the fish as he goes backward. It's happening a bit too soon because the fish hasn't started moving yet. The fish should start moving back, and then this will extend out to drag behind it. Again, this is follow through and overlapping action at play at every point of this animation. You can finesse that a lot more than we have time for in this lesson, but you can see these principles at play. It will come to a rest after the fishes come to a rest. We can pull that way back out here, copy paste this stretch position before it comes back and it could settle into that one as well. You can go really far with this. I'm just showing you those areas where that's possible. Part of animation is it's time consuming and it can be difficult to teach this stuff in a very quick way and still produce animation that makes sense for the lesson and demonstrate the principle we're discussing. I encourage you to go further than we did in this lesson. You can do things like instead of the follow through just being in a linear line, it went back and forth this way, you could go in a circle. It could go down and up and around, and when you get into 3D animation, then you also have the z-axis. It could go in a diagonal up and down and around. It's good to slowly build on these skills and realize how far you can take it, and always have a next goal that you can push for, but just focus on these two things. Animating the tongue is the secondary action. Animating the tentacle is overlapping action. If you want to render this, just hit Control M or choose it from the menu here, and then you can select here to change the codec. I like to select Quick Time and then Apple ProRes 4.2.2 LT, and then I can convert it in HandBrake or something like that later if I want to compress it down more, and then once you've done that, you can change the name of the file and choose where to save it by clicking here and then just hit render. I will see you in the next lesson where we will learn more Principles of Animation. Thanks for watching. 15. Arcs: In this lesson, we're going to learn about the principle of arcs. Once you begin to observe the natural world, that most motion comes in some form of an arc. It's very rare that something can move in exactly a straight line. If you take a look at some of these examples, you can see that the arcs come in all shapes and sizes; big, small, asymmetrical, but that everything has some kind of an arc to it. One main reason for that is because of joints, how they move. Because a joint rotates, that means the limbs are going to move in an arc shape. Once you begin to look for this, you'll begin to see arcs everywhere. Back in the day when Disney began to embrace this principle, their animations became much more fluid and natural-looking. Before, the animations of their characters were very rigid and they would walk straight up and down, kind of like a piston in an engine. Once they began to embrace arcs, their character's hips would bounce and roll over from step to step in an arc fashion instead of a straight up and down motion. This principle is valuable both at the planning stage of animation and at the polish stage of animation. You could encounter this at the beginning and at the end of the process of animating something. It's a great way to plot out your animation to make sure the path of motion has no rough edges to it. Path of motion is a term you might hear. That's not to be confused with line of action, which is something that you might hear when you're doing gesture or figure drawing, where one of the first strokes you make when you're doing that is the line of action to get the through line of how the character is positioned and posed. What we're talking about is the path of motion, how something moves through a scene over time. Here I am in the iPad app, Procreate, where you can create a path with your brush and set it as a background layer, so that each new frame you make, you can be sure you're on the right arc and path of emotion. That's an example of planning your animation using arcs. Toward the end of an animation, especially in 3D, I love to use it to polish my animation to make sure the arcs are moving smoothly. I learned this, the importance of it, from a visitor we had to our school when I was learning animation, was Lino DiSalvo. He was the head of animation for Frozen, and then he was the animation supervisor on Tangled. When he came to visit our school and talk to us as students, he impressed upon us how, when he was animating in those films, that he made sure, at the end of doing his animation, he would go through each single joint of the character and make sure that each arc of those joints was moving exactly how he wanted them to, and they were a nice, fluid arc. That's one of the reasons why those Disney animations look so nice and appealing. In my own animations, one way I will make sure the arcs are working is I'll pick the extreme body part of a character, if I'm doing character animation. For example, one common place I'll pick is the tip of the nose. I'll track the motion of the tip of the nose, because even though I'm using the head joint to rotate, I want to pick something that's further away from that joint that I'm actually animating and track its arc. I'll pick something as far away from that joint as I can, and then I'll track the motion of that arc around. Then I'll also maybe pick the top of the head and I'll track these two arcs around to make sure that they're doing exactly what I want them to be doing, and/or, if I'm maybe not even sure what I want them to be doing, at a bare minimum, I don't want to see any hitches in those paths of motion. I want them to be nice, fluid arcs. In my student film here, you can see that I had a character with a stick. At an early stage of learning animation, I realized how important arcs were because of this animation. I had to track not just the arc of the wrist of the character moving the stick, I also had to track the tip of the stick. So I was tracking two arcs at once and I needed to make sure that they were somewhat related to each other. That way, it looked like the character actually had control over the stick and not the other way around, so that the tip of the stick was following the motion of the wrist and that they were working in tandem together. Because the arm can move like this, but if I'm holding a pen or a pencil, I could also do this. If I'm only tracking this, I'm not tracking any of the motion at actually the tip of the stick. So I was tracking this motion of where this was and what the wrist was doing. These were happening all at the same time. That's why I had to make sure I was tracking both of those points of animation and that they were nice, fluid, and the shape of those were in arcs, some kind of an arc. Typically, when I'm going through an animation and I've made my first pass or even second or third pass at the animation and something doesn't feel right, it's almost always because the arcs aren't working. So I'll have to go into detective mode and start checking each joint or control and try to find out where the arcs aren't working. Nine times out of 10, if it comes to something I can't really put my finger on why it's not working, it almost always comes down to an arc somewhere is not as fluid as it could be. The path of it has maybe a bit of a hitch in it, instead of being a nice curve, there could maybe be a little point where it jets out and then keeps going. That's maybe more for 3D animation because you're depending on some of the keyframes to interpolate between. The computer doesn't know what you want to do if that happens, you're not putting a keyframe on every frame. That's maybe a bit more for 3D animation, but just goes to show how important arcs are and how I use it every single day in every animation I've ever done. But it's good to keep in mind, one of the big challenges I had early on was understanding the style of animation I was in. Early in my career, I was doing more cartoony animation. I was making animated shorts for the mobile game, Clash of Clans. That was much more cartoony and the arcs needed to be really fluid and nice. When I made the transition into working into visual effects, meaning photo-real animation with CG characters, I brought that same appeal in wanting to have the arcs be nice and smooth as they could be. Some of the notes I actually got back from the animation supervisor was the arcs are too smooth, which is something I'd never heard before because I had only ever been animating in this kind of nice cartoony style. I'd never had to work with something a bit more organic, like make something look photo real. So it's good to know what the goal is and the kind of style you're working in because that could dictate whether or not you might need to actually add a little bit of noise into the arc instead of it being super fluid throughout. That was a lesson I learned early on in my career that has helped me make the distinction between cartoony animation and something that's more photo real, and make the switch back and forth and know deliberately those choices I'm making to make sure either I'm making the arcs very smooth or maybe I'm adding a little bit of noise in there to account for jostling and more organic and photo real things that happen in real life. Conversely, if we compare that with 2D animation and drawing, that the difference could be it's very easy to create linear interpolations between drawings or in-betweens. We're going to see that more in this assignment we're going to do after this lesson as an example. Let's just review what we've learned about arcs in this lecture. We've learned that arcs are part of the natural world and that's why there's a lot of innate appeal. Just by the virtue of how things move in nature, that makes our eye attune to that appealing quality of arcs. Then we learned how arcs are important at the beginning of animation, in the planning stage, and at the end during polish, and how that can be different between the style of animation you're using. We're going to get into more 2D examples here in this assignment coming up, so stay tuned for that. We're going to create a nice head turn animation over the next few assignments. We're going to keep working on this animation. We're going to learn another two principles and continue to work on this assignment through those principles because we're going to keep applying what we're learning on to the same assignment as we progress and learn more. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in that assignment lesson. 16. Demo + Assignment 7.1: In this assignment lesson, we're going to do a 2D digital animation or at least begin one. We're going to continue to work on it through the next two assignment lessons after the next two principles as well. You can use either a iPad and Procreate which is what I'm going to use, or you can use Photoshop if you're more comfortable with that or you have access to that. You could also use Brush Ninja, which is a free web app that we've already used, or any of the other free apps that we have in the PDF that you can download and have access to. This is basically just 2D digital animation and any way that you want to do that is fine. Before we begin in the iPad Procreate app, I want to give you an introduction to how to follow along if you're using Photoshop. Let's take a look at that. Here we are in Adobe Photoshop, and if I want to create a new project, I can just click "Create New" and choose the size of project I want, and hit "Create". To get this timeline window, we just need to go to Window and turn on Timeline. This is where we can use animation in Photoshop, and there's basically two methods you can use. One is using each new layer is a frame, or we can choose what's called a video layer. If I just say Create Video Timeline, it's going to give us this layer and if I zoom in here by dragging this Zoom option here up, you can see I can move one frame forward, and I can use the cut method here, or I can make a new layer with a traditional Add New Layer button and for each new layer, it'll create a new frame. That's one way to do it which is also similar to how we're going to work in Procreate. The other way is to go to Layer and go down to Video Layers and say New Blank Video Layer. This is different from the others in the sense that if I start painting on this and I go one frame forward, the drawing is no longer there. Every frame exists on the same layer and the way to manage this as well is from the same Layer menu. We can go back to Video Layers if we wanted to duplicate a frame, insert a blank frame, this is where you can manage adjusting things. It can get a little more complicated because it's a bit hidden here that each new frame has it's own frame, if you're trying to edit and move frames around to know how to do that. Depending on how visually you want to organize this, you could use the video layers or you could use the traditional layer method over here, and you can see the distinction between the two. This has a little filmstrip icon here to distinguish it from the normal layer organization. You can also manage the settings from this little button here to change the frame rate settings, and also to enable onion skinning. This is also where you can render out a video from here. Now that you're ready to follow along, let's open up the iPad. I'm going to hit "Record", so you can follow along with the recording of the iPad. I'm going to open up Procreate, it's an app that it's not free but it's one that's worth the money. I'm going to start a new composition by hitting plus or what they call a new canvas, and I'm going to choose the 920 by 1080 option because that's the HD dimensions. Now to set up animation for this, you need to click the little wrench up here. On Canvas, you needed to choose "Animation Assist", which will give us the timeline at the bottom, and I like the drawing guide for our example we're going to do and going to edit, and then just increase the grid size because in this lesson, what we're going to do is animate a head turn and the shape of the head is going to be a sphere. So the grid I'm choosing is the four quadrants in the center, going to be the size of the head. I'm going to go and just give it a little bit of room on the top and bottom here and then hit done. Don't get too worried if you're not great at drawing, there's really good tools to automate making sure the shapes are clean shapes. In our case, I'm going to go to the Brush tool, and you can use whatever brush you want. I'm using the 6B Pencil which you can add to a Favorites here. If you scroll up you get a plus button here and you're going to add your own favorites, or you can get to this by going to the Sketching category and choosing 6B from there. Now that we have that, you'll be able to see how not great I am at drawing, but how useful this app is. Let me preface this by saying as well that me saying I'm not great at drawing or you thinking you're not good at drawing simply comes down to you just not having spent time doing it. Same thing with me. I've spent more time doing 3D animation so that's what I'm better at. I talk to professional artists who draw every day and are frustrated by the concept that people think they're not naturally talented at drawing, it's that you just haven't spent time doing it, and you haven't gotten over the hump so of not being good. Everyone is not good when they start. Just keep that in mind when you're thinking about should I continue to draw? Don't base it on whether or not you're good right now. Spend a lot of time with it and then determine whether you want to continue or not. Anyway, off that soapbox. Now that we have the brush selected, I'm going to draw with my pen, you can also use your finger with this. Just to demonstrate, I'm going to use my finger, and I'm going to start at the top quadrant here in the center, and then just go and try to touch each quadrant of the grid, and then just keep my finger held down, and you can see that it turned it into an ellipse. If I click "Edit Shape", it also it gives me these four little controller areas here and you can space these out. They'll touch the four quadrants there, so the circle itself goes all the way around. I'm going to undo that one just because I didn't like the thickness of my brush there, I'm used to using the pen which is pressure-sensitive, so make sure that you like how thick the brushes if you're using your finger. I'm just going to go over this one more time with my pencil. Because I'm pushing down harder, it's picking up a bit of a thicker brush, and then I'm going to edit shape and make sure it's in line with what we expect. Also in this lesson, we're going to be animating very roughly. It would be a terrible idea in any animation workflow to add all the details on every single frame that you're doing at the beginning, planning almost stages like what we're in. If you colored it in and added all the details, texture, whatever you wanted to do, that would be a terrible idea because you're not sure if you're even going to keep that drawing yet. In animation, we're determining motion not necessarily the drawing itself. If we're doing a single drawing maybe sure, but we're doing mini drawing, so we want to keep it as rough as possible when we're at the early stages so that if we make mistakes, change our mind, adjust things, it's fewer things we're adjusting and we haven't started a polish the actual drawings yet. Don't get too caught up in how this looks drawing-wise, what we're concerned about is the motion. We're going to keep it simple so that this is easy to do. What we now need to do is create construction lines. I'm going to draw oval in the center of this. In construction lines, I'm going to click "Edit Shape", basically you're going to make this thing appear to be in three-dimensions. How far we space out the left and right side is going to be the front and back of this three-dimensional sphere we're now drawing. It's going to determine how far the beginning poses and the end poses. I think this is far enough, so the next thing we need to do is do the horizontal one which will dictate the tilt in the head. I'm going to draw another oval here very quickly, just hold it down, and now, we have a roughly good shape in Edit Shape, and make sure this connects with the outline and isn't going too far. I want their head tilt to be a bit more neutral. I'm going to bring this up closer to the midpoint of the sphere, and that's a three-dimensional sphere basically. Those are construction lines, it's going to help us determine where to place the features of the face. Those features for us are only going to be the ears, eyes, nose, and mouth. We're not going to do any other details at least just yet. At the end of this assignment, I'm going to show you how you can go in and add details, you can use what we're doing now as just the outline, and you can trace over this and be much more accurate later on. But what we want to do now is get the motion then. Now that we have that, we can place the features on. I'm going to choose to put the eyes and nestle them right here, and I want to make them a bit more circular than oval. I'm going to just drag that out and do another one and set it right next to it, and do the same thing, and make sure it's a bit more circular. When you're also drawing things in perspective meaning in depth, things that are further away from you are going to be slightly smaller. This eye that we're drawing now should and could be slightly bigger than the one that's further away from us. We're basically looking at drawing something in perspective like this at this angle like that. It's going off into space. We can put the nose basically start it right here, and I'm going to draw down and draw a triangle and connect it up to the construction line, and then you can put the mouth however you want. I'm just going to draw a simple line right here, it give us something to look at, and then draw half lids here and put it in the pupils. I'm going to put the ear in, and it's going to be the bottom of the ear. It's basically going to be at this construction line. I'm going to follow the top of the eye there to be where the top of the ear should be so that we can stay consistent through our drawings and know what we're trying to match to. Now, because these construction lines are behind the head, I'm going to erase them. I mean, we could delete those but erase them. But just for keeping track sake, I'm going to leave those in for now and get a really small brush. You can, of course, scale this up and get in here and clean up these lines as much as you want. But again, don't get too precious with this at this stage yet because we could maybe delete this drawing all together, who knows, if we decide we don't like this beginning position or whatever. It's good to stay very loose at the early stage. Let's duplicate this head basically and flip it over to the other side. I'm going to duplicate this by selecting this keyframe, duplicate, and then I'm going to choose the arrow up here and I'm going to say flip horizontal. Now, we have a very simple way to get the end pose without having to do a bunch of drawing. We can adjust this later, draw it differently later if we want. But basically, this is going to be the start and end pose. Now where the arcs come in, and what we just learned about in the previous lesson, is determining where we put the features and how the head moves in between the start and the end. Now, if we were concerned about arcs, it could be a straight line. Like I said in a previous lesson, I usually like to choose the tips of the nose to determine where my arcs are, which sit a straight in-between. We can just do a straight line here. Actually, if you click and draw in Procreate and hold, it'll also choose a straight line there. We would put our nose right here. I mean, we could just to do that very quickly. Draw the eyes. Sorry, we're not on a new frame, back up. Let's add a frame and drag it to the middle. We could put the nose right in the middle, put the eyes right in the middle. If we scrub between this, I'm just going to put the lids down here, like the eyes are closed. Let's turn off the onion skin so we can actually see the drawings by themselves, and it quickly put in the outline of the head. Now, if we were to do this and not be concerned about arcs, you can see that this is pretty boring, the head just go straight across. There's no visual interests there. Because our eyes are tuned to see arcs in nature and in our everyday life, this just doesn't seem right and our brains tell us that, and that's why this does not look appealing. As simple as these three drawings are, there's a way to make it more appealing. These principles of animation are meant to be checklist. If you don't know why you're drawing or your animation rather is not appealing, you can use these principles as a checkbox to go through, have I done these? Do I need to do these? Let's turn back on onion skinning to determine what makes an arc here, what constitutes an arc for us. I'm going to choose the noses again and just draw an arc. If I click and hold, Procreate will create a nice, pretty arc. We can see that where are the tip of our nose should be if we're doing an arc should be down here. That's where I'm going to put the nose, and I'm going to delete these guides here for us. But instead of just being straight in the middle, what we can do is lean into the principle of overlapping action. Using the selection tool and just dragging that, we can actually rotate this a bit. The nose is being dragged behind because it's trying to stay behind where it was if an object tends to stay at rest, unless a force is acting on it. The nose who was at rest, there's a lot more cartilage in the nose and so it's a lot more flexible. So when the head is driving the motion, the nose might actually stay behind for a little bit, especially in a cartoony situation. That's why I'm making that slight adjustment. Now, for the eyes, I'm going to use the ones we previously did, trace them so that makes sure we have the same proportions. Click Edit Shape so then I can move them. I'm going to also drag them behind, maybe even squash and stretch them so they'd be in a bit of a stretch pose here, and do the same thing for the other side. Bring it over as well and also favor. You also might hear the term favoring quite a bit. That means you're favoring one drawing or the other. Right now, we're favoring the first drawing. So we're leaning everything towards that way. I want his eyes to be closed here, so I'm going to draw a bit of an arc here. The mouth I want to drag behind as well, so I'm just going to draw a little line there. Because we're looking at him straight on as well, we need to be able to see both of his ears right here. I'm going to draw his ears in, just going to draw one here to make sure it's the right size. Edit shape and then just move this whole thing over and do the same thing for the other side. In this middle pose, we'll be able to see both ears. In these three drawings, we've basically established the arc of this that we're going to continue through the next lessons of this assignment and as we learn about more principles of animation. As I scrubbed through, you can see we've established this. Now, the struggle that we're going to come into that happens in 2D animation is if you handed this over to someone and said, okay, in-between this, and what can happen in a computer if you say pose 1, pose 2 is just going to go in a straight line. We need to massage this and force it to be in the arc that we want it to throughout the animation. As we go through this process, we're going to want to make sure that the in-between isn't like this. Right here, we want to make sure that the in-between is also going in an arc, it's following the arcs of the tip of the nose down further. We don't want to go in a straight line between these poses because, again, we want to continue to apply this principle of arcs not just once, not just twice, but through the whole animation. Let's continue learning about principles of animation. In the next lesson, we're going to learn about the difference between pose to pose and straight ahead animation how that affects your choice and workflow. Thanks for watching, and I will see you in the next lesson. After that one, we'll continue to come back to this assignment and finish this out and continue to make it look much more pretty than it is now. Thanks for watching. 17. Pose to Pose & Straight Ahead: This is the first lesson. We're going to deviate from the principles we've been learning and learn a slightly different one. All the principles up until now have, in some way or another, had to do with physics. This principle has to do with the personal choice of the animator on their workflow. That principle is called pose to pose and straight ahead. They're basically the two choices you have when you're deciding how you want to animate. Pose to pose means exactly that. You're animating with as few drawings as possible to describe an action. Let's say, for example, you have an animation that's 100 frames. In theory, you could start animating with just three key poses. One on frame 1, one on frame 50, one on frame 100, for example; beginning, middle, end if that's what it takes to describe whatever action is occurring. You want to use as few drawing as possible to describe and get a sense for what the overall action is of that animation. Then later, you can come back in and do the in-betweens and the breakdowns between those key poses. It's a good way to plan your animation to know where you're starting and where you're ending in that scene and in that animation. Now, it's a good time to maybe mention some of the terms you'll hear when referring to the types of poses and drawings or keys that you're going to set. The main ones is, like I've already described, the key poses. Some people call those the golden poses. You might also hear the extremes. In that case, that might be even more specific in what's describing the overshoots, where the keys could be the main story poses, which is another term, the story keys. There's a lot of different ways to describe the same thing. The essence of it is what are the fewest amount of drawings I can show you and you know what's going to happen. That's the idea pose to pose. You're going from pose to pose to pose. Then later you'll make it nice, fluid animation, and those are called in-betweens and breakdowns. Now, the other option that you have is called straight ahead animation. That means that you start at frame 1 and you go through frame 100 in chronological order and you make every drawing or every pose that needs to be made, and that's how you animate. There's no bouncing around and going from frame 1 to 50 to 100 and then back to 25 and then to 75 and then to 12. You're not doing the breakdowns in the same way that you would in pose to pose. You're doing them in a sequential, chronological order, starting at the beginning and you go all the way to the end. You've done both of these examples if you've been following along with the assignments. Just like in the last assignment, we did the head turn. We basically drew the key poses. We were doing pose to pose. We started at the beginning and we went to the middle and the end. We didn't do three drawings on the first frame, second frame, and third frame. We don't really know what the frames are yet, that's going to come later when we discuss timing, but we basically did what we knew were going to be describing the action, what's going to happen. He's going to turn his head, how is he going to turn his head? He's going to turn his head in a bit of an arc. You did the pose to pose method there, planning out the animation, and then you did the straight ahead animation when you follow it along and did the post-it notes stop motion and/or the scissors stop motion. Those examples we animated from frame 1, frame 2, 3, 4 until the animation was done. Doing those assignments, you can see how that's almost required of stop motion animation and makes that medium of animation. That much more challenging and impressive when it's done well because they almost certainly did it using straight ahead animation techniques. Even though at the high level on stop motion animated movies, they do a lot of planning and they'll rough out the motion with very limited animation poses and then go through and do straight ahead all the way through after they've animated that scene once or twice very roughly. But in our case, what we need to understand is the difference between those two options and when they're useful. Most animators use pose to pose because it's really good for planning. You know where you're coming from and where you're going. You're not making it up as you go along. You can also, in 2D drawing, keep your proportions because you can compare with what you did at the beginning and what you did at the end. Take a look at this example real quick of an animation I did straight ahead. You can see his legs are very tall at the beginning, very short at the end because I did straight ahead, and I'm not that great at keeping proportions using straight ahead 2D animation. That's not to say it's impossible, people are able to do it. I'm just not that experienced doing 2D animation, so that's much more difficult for me. Now, take a look at this example I did pose to pose animation. Look at the start and the end. The length of his legs are pretty much the same because I was able to, over a few frames, describe where it was going to start, where it's going to end, and it's a lot easier to compare those two and then draw the in-betweens to keep those mile markers in mind when you're drawing. In 3D animation, we also do that as well. We will animate and what's called a stepped mode. We keep them basically looking like held drawings for certain amount of time to help describe the action in held poses or in what's called stepped mode in 3D. For me personally, I like to use pose to pose. It's easy to plan my animation, I know where I'm going, and I can also use straight ahead animation if I want to sometimes. Usually, if there's a quick action happening, I'll just go ahead and do some straight ahead animation. But even then, it's usually not on every frame. It's every third, fourth frame, something like that. Well, I animate on fours, even in CG animation. They go back in and make sure the animation is working. But when I began learning the idea of these, I would get frustrating because I would think, well, if straight ahead is just working chronological, isn't pose to pose just a different version of that? It was hard for me to make the distinction between those two methods because you have to draw one drawing after the other at some point, so how was that not somehow straight ahead a little bit? It's just over a longer period of time. In my mind, that is true, that's the case. But straight ahead in the strictest sense really means one frame right after the other. You can use both one or the other, a blend of them. It's really up to you. Don't get frustrated like I did not really understanding what the difference was between those because I felt like when I was doing the pose to pose method, I was still having to determine the pose after the one I just drew, so how is that not straight ahead but just with a little bit more of a gap. Don't get caught up too much in those constructs. It's just a bit of a way to distinguish something like stop motion animation, which really does need to work on straight ahead key frames because of the nature of the medium like you see on the assignments and something like in 3D animation where we could start on frame 1 and then make a pose on frame 2,000 and go back and forth and between all the different key frames and breakdowns that we need to do, which isn't really possible in stop motion animation as easily as in 3D or 2D. It's just a good idea to know what those are when you're working in animation and have contacts for how you're working. In this lesson, we learned about the differences between the pose to pose animation method and the method of animating straight ahead. In this course, you've already done both of those methods. You have real-world experience already of what the disadvantages and advantages of both of those are and in what instances you might choose one or the other. You could also use a blend of them if you want. Let's, with that in mind, in the next lesson, continue on working on our animation of the head turn and apply that technique to what we're doing now that we have more context. Thanks for watching, I'll see you there. 18. Demo + Assignment 7.2: We're back working on the head-turn assignment with more contexts of animation principles, like straight ahead and pose to pose. Now, we learned a little bit about what we call these now. These are basically the story poses or the golden poses that tells us the overall action in as fewest drawings or keyframes possible. Now, turn off the onion skin for a second so we can scrub through this and see we're starting middle end. Now, one of the things that we discussed quickly was extreme poses. The extremes, in the case of our assignment, is going to be the overshoots and the anticipation, because if we're going to anticipate this head-turn, like when we learned about anticipation and I had the example of a head-turn, we had motion in the opposite direction, so we should be looking or turning our head this way first before we go in the opposite direction and almost looks like it's coming out of his nose. Then on the overshoot, when we get over here, the extreme, the furthest he goes, it's hard to slow down your head, when we overshoot, we can actually go past where we're trying to stop because of the weight of our head, or maybe we don't just have as good control over our bodies as we'd hope. We go past where we want to and then come back and settle where this story poses. Now, understanding pose to pose, we're going to apply those other extreme poses here. What I'm going to do to make that a lot more simple is I'm going to duplicate these by just clicking on them. I'm going to move them with the selection tool because it's going to be such slight adjustments, they don't really constitute new drawings when we're working as roughly. I'm just going to draw around this and grab the arrow here and move this slightly along where this path is. I don't want to go on a straight line across so you can see where, under this left pupil, that wouldn't make sense, we need to follow this arc around. I'm going to stay in line with that at least. That's basically going to be the anticipation. It doesn't really even need to be that much. It's just a little bit and then we can move the ear as well. I'm moving these separately because things on a sphere move differently. This moves a lot quicker than my ear does because there's a lot more distance relative to the camera's view than the ear moving back in space, you're going to keep seeing it. This will have maybe a little more distance to move. I don't want to scale it, so I need to zoom in here and do that. Then now drag this over just a bit, maybe just as tiny bit more than the face, because the face is already on the edge of our silhouette of the head. It's just little things like that to help sell the effect that this is a three-dimensional head. Now we have the anticipation. If you end up putting the frame in the wrong place, you can just click and drag them around and place them where you need to. But we have that where we want. We are going to rotate the head over here and then we're going to move down around. If I play that back, it's going way too fast. I've actually adjusted while it's playing back just to get a sense of the timing. We're going to drag the frames per second way down. Maybe let's do two or three. Then we can just get a sense of, even just with as few poses as we have, what that's like. The other way we can test this out at this early stage is to do held poses. It'll also help us start to figure out the timing, but that's for a bit later. But we can hold the duration of these frames, put these grade frames in here, so that we can have a bit of a better understanding of how this is going to go. Maybe I'll just do one frame here because that's going to be the fastest motion. Then we can play that back. Now we're getting a better sense of the timing even with just four frames. It's why I love animation, what you can get away with when you're animating. Now that we've done this, let's create the overshoot. We have the end story pose here, I'm just going to bring all these back down to none so that we don't get confused on what we're doing here. We're going to revisit the timing later. I'm just going to make the overshoot basically do the opposite that we just did. Select this stuff and then move it over just a touch. Now, the other thing to take into account, first, I need to make the duplicate frame, I don't want to be working on this one. I'm going to go back to this frame because this is going to be where the overshoot is right here. Well, now, this is the end pose, we're going to end here, so we need to overshoot that here in this pose, we're going to go pass it. The other thing to think about when you're doing an overshoot is maybe offsetting stuff, maybe the mouth is still catching up, so maybe the overshoot isn't all the features of the face. Let's just turn on onion skinning so we can see this a bit better, and the secondary so we can see the colors here. Maybe the mouth itself is catching up, so we can actually move this back in another direction here, go back here, or just even redraw this because it's just a line here. It's like I'm too lazy even though we're working very easily with digital stuff here. Maybe the mouth is dragging behind the other features of the face, and then these features have gone past and overshot where they're going to end. Once we move that, we can see the green beneath it, what we're actually doing here. You could even add a little rotation here if you want. That's essentially the idea. When I revisit, now that we have the onion skin on, the first frame here, we can see the ear is a lot more. We need to also go back and do this for the ear before we get ahead of ourselves here. This one would follow the features of the face a bit more than the mouth, they're not going to drag as much. If you have really floppy ears, maybe they would. Let's go to the overshoot here. The other thing that we could maybe indicate is that we're going to have a blink. Because we have the middle blink here, maybe he's already starting to blink, so we can maybe add in the half right here on the anticipation that he's about to start blinking. Same thing with the overshoot. This is, well, like animation; you change your mind, go back, mess with stuff. Maybe we do want the mouth in the same place, maybe it just changes shape, maybe it's more of a half-moon thing. Learning pose to pose and straight ahead, we understand the value of being able to plan our animation like this, not having to determine from frame 1 exactly how we're going to do the extremes, which is what we just put in. We put in the extreme poses here because that indicates the furthest that the head goes on this animation. Let's just take a look real quick at two frames a second and we can get a sense of what the animation's going to look like as we continue to flash this out. Hopefully you'll be impressed by how far we can take this in the next time we touch this. Let's learn a little bit about timing now in the next lesson, which is really going to help cap off the knowledge that we need to finish this animation. Thanks for watching, I'll see you there. 19. Timing: Obviously, we couldn't have animation without time. We need time for animation to work. This principle about timing that we're learning about has much more to do with specific choices around timing of your animation. For example, earlier, we learned about slow in and slow out. That has to do with timing, so you've already learned about how important it is to time out animations like that. It indicates something moving slow or fast. It indicates whether or not there needs to be more frames or less frames for an action to take place. In terms of character, it could mean the character is slow or fast, weak or strong, old or young. It can display and convey a lot of information just in how we tweak and change timing. Are they tired? Are they energetic? There's so much going on with timing that can change the feeling of your animation. It's really important to understand this concept. Within correct timing, your audience might not even be able to see what's happening. But with correct timing, not only can they see it, but they feel the energy that you want them to feel or the lack thereof whether it's something moving fast or slow. Timing also refers to something we discussed in the science of animation class when we learned about frame rates. Essentially, if we're doing 2D animation, we're animating on twos. But if we're doing a fast motion, holding a frame for two frames might make it feel too slow, so we might also need to make the timing decision to animate on ones for a portion of that animation. It's those types of decisions and choices that need to be made to make sure that the animation is playing in the way that you want it to. With 2D animation, they have a special way to describe timing, and that's through the use of timing charts. Timing charts are a way to show how many frames are going to occur between the key poses or the key drawings, the golden poses or the extremes. In pose to pose language we discussed, there needs to be a timing chart so that the inbetweeners know what they're doing. You see back in the day when 2D animation was more prevalent and there were 2D animation departments, they were set up in a way that they were the key pose drawers, the key animators, and they would draw the key drawings. In the top corner somewhere, they would draw a timing chart that would show between their key poses what the inbetweeners should do. Once they got the key drawings done, they would actually hand their drawings over and let someone else finish their animation, and that was the inbetweeners. Those inbetweeners would get the drawings, they would see the timing chart. Sometimes they would have the little note on there of, watch your arcs, making sure that the inbetweeners aren't drawing straight lines between the poses, and the inbetweeners would finish the animation based on the timing charts. They would through those be able to see, am I meant to favor this key drawing or that key drawing when the character is moving through that motion? That's how timing charts came about and how useful they can be. Now, we can also apply them to the project we're currently working on with the head turn. In the case of 3D animation and 2D digital animation, it's important to understand timing in terms of the Graph Editor. We saw that briefly with the anglerfish eating the other fish when we were working inside of After Effects. The Graph Editor basically displays time on the x-axis and the value change on the y-axis. Your ability to understand this and to control it is going to make you a better animator and be able to help you massage and finesse your animations in a way that if you don't understand this you'll always be at a novice level. Understanding how timing is displayed in the Graph Editors is really important to those animation mediums. It's also important to understand why it's good to learn animation not in a single program, especially a digital one. Because at an early stage, you can get lulled into a false sense of good animation because the computer is giving it to you. Basically, you're setting two keyframes and the computer is interpolating between those two keyframes and giving you that animation. You're not telling it what to do on every frame. But when you're doing animation mediums like stop motion or hand drawing them, you have to dictate every single frame, nothing is given to you. That's why it's good at early stages to keep practicing with those mediums so that you're not getting lost in this false sense of progression in your skills when the computer is just handing you those interpretations of minimal keyframes. We want to make sure that we're controlling exactly what we want on every single keyframe. Whether it's in any medium, it doesn't matter. You may hear timing used in conjunction with the term spacing, and we learned about spacing when we learned about slow in and slow out. It's basically the two pieces of animation that are really going to dictate how the animation feels in the speed at which it moves. Timing refers to how long something takes to occur. Spacing talks about the distance between that time of how those poses play out. In the example of slow in and slow out, that's a gradual increase of spacing over time. Slow in would be a gradual decreasing of spacing over time so that each frame gets closer and closer to the next. Those two things can dictate a lot of your animation, and it's important to understand how they relate to each other because, especially when we're doing timing charts, that can also dictate the spacing of those drawings. That's what's being shown in those timing charts. Whichever medium you're using, you can use that thought process; am I going to favor this, am I going to favor that? Even if you're not using timing charts, you can use that skill and that thought process to help you aid how you're approaching an animation. In this lesson, you learned about timing, learned about how it's fundamental to animation. Mostly in this principle aspect, it's about specific choices. It's about the amount of time something takes, what that conveys as far as energy in your animation, how that is used in 2D animation whether it's traditional or digital. In 3D animation, we talked about the Graph Editor and how spacing also comes into play with timing. We covered a lot and we're going to use that to finish this animation we've done with the head turn and just let's get this thing done and crank this out. In this next lesson, I'm also going to show you how you can polish that up so that you can make it look a lot nicer. We're laying the groundwork and the framework for a good animation, and we can make it much more pretty after the fact. But again, it's not what moves. It's how it moves, and that's what we're focused on now. I'll see you in the next lesson. Thanks for watching. 20. Demo + Assignment 7.3: We're going to finish the head turn animation. I'm going to move quickly so that we can get this done. If you need to just watch now and then follow later, pause, rewind, you can do that later. It might be easier to just watch right now instead of following along. Let's do a quick overview. We have our beginning, our anticipation, our in-between, our overshoots and our final pose. Now, I'm going to increase the anticipation a little bit just so we exaggerated it and we can see it a little bit better. Before I start, I'm going to move this over just a little bit more. I'm going to doing the same thing with the ear. Again, don't worry about how rough this is, we can clean this up later, and I'll show you how to do that. When we were talking about timing in the last lesson, we can demonstrate what the timing charts mean and give an indication of what the timing we want to have. We could do a mock version of that by using the hold frames here to get an idea of just how long we want each frame to be and how many frames we need in-between. But I'm just going to work quickly and show you, I know how I want this to look. I don't want this to be an even transition and we're just going start at the beginning. I'll go through, do timing charts then we can go back through and do the animation. I know I don't want this to be an even middle in-between, I want it to be a bit snappier. I want to favor the start pose and I want to favor the anticipation pose. This pose was pose A, I know that I want to favor it, so I'm going put a mark here. I want to favor the end pose which would be pose B or the anticipation pose right here. I'm just going to move this one over so we don't have it in the onion skin. On B, we're now going to the green pose, which is going to be the in-between and it's going to be a pretty fast movement, but I know I want to slow out. Now remember that principle from earlier lesson, that means a gradual increase of spacing. I know we should probably have a middle pose here and then I can just keep having that to make it be a gradual increase of spacing. I know when I do these drawings, I'm going to need to get this middle drawing first and then I can do another middle drawing here. I'm going have to draw the animation frames backwards from here to be able to get these E's outs or the slow outs. Now, this is moving quickly. We can call this C here. We want this to slope into the overshoot, so we can do the opposite of what we just did. We know we want a middle pose there. We can middle it again, and then have it again there into D, which is going to be the overshoot. Now we're on D and we can do the same thing we did on the antic and have it be snappy. We favor the overshoot and favor the end pose. I know I want two frames there. Now we have our timing charts and we can go through and have a game plan of what we want to do. I'm going to duplicate this because in the last stages I like to just duplicate the frame and move stuff around as opposed to creating brand new drawings so that I know at least the proportions are correct and they're not going to be changing much if we're not moving that much. I'm just going to add this end. We're going to move this ever so slightly. Because remember, we're favoring the pose that's coming from the pose we just duplicated, we're favoring it, which means we want to stay close to it. I'm just slightly moving that. We do the same thing for the ear very quickly. Not with a brush, but with the selection tool and then move that just slightly not scale it. I'm going to make sure I'm selecting on the center part of that, so it doesn't try to start scaling it. Then do the same thing for the anticipation pose. We can duplicate the anticipation pose and make sure we're working on the one before it because we're coming into it. Select it, and then we'll move this backward. I make sure I grab the mouth. Because we want to favor this one, that's why we duplicate it and just barely moving it back toward the previous frame we just did. The same thing with ear. Grab the center of this so that we can move just slightly. Now we can scrub the playback, that will be easier if we turn off onion skin. We can see that the anticipation is working pretty good, it's a bit rough, but that's okay. The one big jump I'm seeing is in the mouth. We can just go and fix that real quick. Turn on onion skin. Let's delete this mouth and give it a better in-between here. Because we're doing something a little bit different with the mouth, it's doing its own thing, I want to make sure I'm following each part of the animation well. The mouth is going away from the other parts of the face. I think this pose is going down too far on the face. Let me just bring that back up and begin to move it down, which is not what we want, and maybe slightly rotate it. It's good to check your drawings by scrubbing like this to make sure it's doing what you want. Then the other thing that we can add in on this is a bit of an ease in on the eyelids. On this extra pose we just made, we can have the eyelids just starting to come up. Now scrub it and we have the eyelids closing, the mouth doing its own thing and the anticipation working. Now we can go into the timing chart for this move. If we look over here, we know we want to slow out. Let's duplicate. What we want to do is we want to get this middle frame first. I'm going to add a frame here and draw the outline of the head and very quickly edit the shape and get it in the neighborhood. Before I go too far, I also want to dip the head down in translation, so I'm going to go to the in-between here. I'm going to actually drop this whole thing down so that our in-betweens also can go in-between that. We're just going to dip the head down a little bit, so it's going to be part of favoring that arc. It just increases the arc. If we're following the nose, this arc can be a bit more exaggerated. Let me get a better arc here. If you press and hold it will also make an arc. If we know we want to go halfway on this new frame, the nose should be about here, it can keep dragging behind. Then we can erase this guide here from our drawing. Then we can put the eyes relative to the nose very quickly, and we can favor these eyes. I'm just going to do this. We want them already closed. So I'm going to just basically copy those and then bring them back where they need to be relative to the nose here. Maybe rotate them slightly. Then we can do the in-between on the mouth. The mouth can start to drag, because we see it's left of the nose on the green. We can start to move it left here, so that next pose makes sense for that. Then, if we look at the left, we can see that you're fully here. So we want to start to indicate the ear coming out there, and then we can do an in-between for this other ear going in the other direction, and just move it over about halfway. Now, we can scrub through. See we have a good arc happening there, and then we can now work on the ease out. Let's add another frame here, so now we're working on this one. We can do a halfway between this again, so this will be the ease out. What I can do is, follow this arc here. That means the nose is there. I'm going to create this nose to make sure the proportions are the same. Make sure I'm grabbing the selection so I can move that around. I'm not wanting to scale it, which is very fun with Procreate. If your thing is too small, it'll make you scale it, so you got to zoom in a little bit from time to time. Then, we can roughly get the eyes in here. They'll go ahead and be closed here as well. Then we can move these into place. I'm going to rotate that much. We can move them there, so now they're about halfway. Then, same on the mouth. We can go halfway here. We can just barely start to indicate the ear here, and then go halfway on this ear. It's a lot of back and forth. You can see why it's good to keep the features pretty basic when you're starting out so that you're not giving yourself too much to deal with. Now, we just need to do half again. Need to make the outline of the head before we get too ahead of ourselves here. Now we can do half again. Like I said earlier, animating backwards. Based on the timing charts, we need to get the halfway point before we start doing the other breakdowns, or the other in-betweens. I'm going to turn off the onion skin for a second and just play it through. We may not even need that extra. We may not even need this breakdown here, so I may leave that off for now, and if we need to later, come back and do it. But this is playing back pretty good. I'm going to make sure I'm in the right frames per second. We're on 12, so that's right. I want every frame to be held for two frames. Now we can work on the other timing charts. We can do the in-between here. It's like we are doing a mirror version of what we've just done. I'm going to turn on the onion skin for one frame. The one thing that we didn't do here on this frame was, make sure that the circle itself was an in-between. So we can just get that halfway here. Then we can move the internal features back up slightly because we don't want to over-arc them. Same thing is with the ears here. We get a little ahead of ourselves there. Then, on this in-between, we can make sure that the head is coming back up. We could maybe favor the down position here, because the head is so huge and so heavy it wouldn't come back up with the same speed that it's going down. So we can favor the down position so it stays down a little longer. Then, we can do these straight in-betweens here.So we're going from seeing both ears to only seeing one. So we can start to hide this ear over here, and then we can do the in-between of this ear. Then for the arc we can figure out this arc here, in the middle there. Some visually remembering where we put it here. It's going to be around in here. I'm going to keep dragging the nose this way. Then you can flip back the other direction on the overshoot. You go halfway here, really dragging the mouth. Then copy these eyes again and put them in place where they should be, relative to the nose over here. Now, based on our timing chart, we need to go half again. We're looking at this timing chart and we just did this pose, so now we need to do half again between our overshoot and what we just did. Let's add an empty frame here. Let's keep favoring the bottom because the head is so heavy. I don't want to come up super quick. I'm just doing this to get the head in line with how big it should be. Again, we don't want to be changing the head shape as we're working. Now, I can move this whole thing down so that we're favoring the bottom still. Then on this overshoot, let's just go ahead and bring this overshoot down, just go grab this whole thing. We're only overshooting in the direction that he's turning not vertically because his head is so heavy. I want this head to feel a lot heavier. I want that to just easing into this position. Now we can finish this in-between. It's in-between the mouth, in-between the ears here, and then we can get rid of this ear altogether. Just maybe give a little indication there. Then I'm going to keep dragging this nose. I'm going to make sure that's happening on an arc still. So I'm going to make sure I'm coming down far enough. Then I'm going to draw these eyes again. Then move that into place. I'm going to get these rotated a bit more even, because when you see the top of the eyes here, we don't want them to be too crooked. So let's start to get them a bit more straight here as well. Then we can play this back. Again, we might be able to get away without having to do another frame here. Even though I wrote that on the timing chart, we can just get rid of it. I think that's going to be good. Then we can just finish this overshoot settle, the way we did the anticipation. We're going to come into this settle pose. Remember, the mouth is going to continue to be catching up. I'm going to duplicate this frame. I'm going to favor the frame we just did, the frame we duplicated. Except for the mouth, the mouth is going to be still catching up. I want to favor this frame. Then for the mouth, I'm just going to do a straight in-between. For the ear, we're going to favor because it's rotating like the rest of the head. I'm going to favor where we're coming from. So we're just going to barely move it. Then we can duplicate this frame, go back to the one where we're coming into this final pose, and we can favor this one. We're going to favor the one we just duplicated. So it's going to be in easing in motion from here. We can just go back towards the red indication just slightly. Make sure this isn't getting off centered here. Just undo that. Make sure it's not going vertically there. Erase the mouth, and then ease in on the mouth. We're going to favor that one. Then we're going to move this slightly away towards the red. Now, we've basically done the entire animation, although, we probably need to work on the blink opening. We could do a squash and stretch on the eyes closing and opening. But this is basically the animation. The mouth is a bit floaty. We could fix that and have it not drag. It's from this drawing. I don't know what that was. The mouth is way wrong. We need to get a little bit better on that. I think I got a little confused on the in-betweens here. Just fixing the mouth real quick. There we go. Delete this. We're just trying to find the best way to get into that rest pose. It was a bit too floaty there. We've basically done the head turn. It feels pretty good. I want to show you how you can now take this even further and make it a little bit better by filling it in, giving it shading, texturing. What we can do and procreate is to add layers to each frame. How to do that is by using groups. If we go down here, we can see that every frame that we've made is its own layer. If we add a new layer in, it's going to think we want a new frame, but we don't. We want to add this as completely new drawing for that frame. We click and hold this. We can make a group. Now, we can move this above. I encourage you to move it above because if you try to move this one below, you'll pull it out of the group. Always use the one on the bottom and bring it to the top, not the top to the bottom. We can click in, bring the opacity way down. I'm going to turn off the onion skinning because we no longer need that, our animation's done. What we can do is use whatever tools that we want now to make this look nice. We could use a different pen. We could use this one which has a nice clean edge to it. We can get rid of the construction lines. Now, if we try to draw, it'll ask us, hey, which layer in this group are you trying to animate on or drawn? So we need to choose it from the group. Now, we can have maybe cleaner lines if that's the aesthetic we're going to. Then we could do fills to this if we wanted. I will leave that up to you. I'm going to go through and do that for my animation. I'm going to let you do that for yours. Hopefully, this has been pretty instructive on how to do timing charts, how to do breakdowns, how to create extremes, how to use arcs, how to use procreate, and how to use construction lines to make sure the sphere looks 3D when we're going through emotion. I'm going to clean this up now and I encourage you to do the same. I look forward to seeing what you make. Hopefully, you can share that with me in the class. In the next lesson, we're now going to move into a different group of principles of animation. It's going to help finish out the concepts of appeal that you can apply to your animation. I'll see you in the next lesson. Thanks for watching. 21. Staging, Exaggeration, Solid Drawing, & Appeal: To review the principles we've learned so far, we can recognize that they all have to do with physics except for straight ahead and pose to pose. That just goes to show how important understanding motion is to creating appealing animation. Now, the next four principles we're going to discuss that the nine old men of Disney coined are all having to do with creating clarity in your animation and your ideas and how that clarity can help you strive towards appealing animation. Staging as a principle, refers to the arrangement of the elements of your animation in the frame that you have. It could be akin to something like telling where your actors to stand on a stage play at a theater. You wouldn't tell them to stand behind the curtain the entire play or face the opposite direction of the audience. In the same way in our animations, we want to make sure that we're presenting our elements, whatever it is, motion graphics or character, as clearly as we can so that the audience knows what to focus on by the way that they're arranged in the frame that we have. The clearest example of this is the silhouette. That is one of our big advantages in animation and helps clearly communicate what is happening in the frame, especially for characters. An easy way that I test this when I'm doing 3D animation in Maya is to hit seven on the keyboard, which is the shortcut to turn off all the lights. What you get is basically the outline in a black silhouette of the character. Let's try that experiment now. If I wanted the audience to look at what I'm holding in my hand, like this thing, should my silhouette look like this? Or should my silhouette look like that? I'm looking at it all my attention is going towards it. I'm holding it away from my body so the silhouette looks nice. I'm not doing this either. Should I be doing this? Will that make it more clear what's happening that you should be looking here? Just because you're going to animate something like this hand over here, doesn't mean you should? Clarity in staging what you're doing and silhouette and in motion can help direct the attention where you want it to be. Conversely to that example, you could have a ton of motion going on in the frame and your subject being totally still. Could be, they are going to look at what's not moving as well. You have all these elements to use at your disposal, whether it's silhouette, lighting, color, motion. You can use all of these things to help stage your animation in the frame that you have so that audience focuses on what you want them to focus on. Exaggeration is the next principle. It refers to pushing the animation to an extent that's beyond the normal bounds of the motion. That can be just for a few frames even. It doesn't mean distorting the entire animation, the model, the character, the design for a long period of time, it means usually a very short amount in the actual motion. Or you could also exaggerate the idea of a subject as well and character chairing an idea very far. It could be the micro of the action that's occurring, and just for a few frames, just like in squash and stretch, you might exaggerate how much squash and stretch there is in real life just so that it's more readable to the viewer in frame. Now, one of the examples from my professional career for this would be when I animated on Ready Player One. It was a super fun movie to work on. One example from that movie is the actual characters on that movie were actors that were captured in a motion capture performance. They had a camera that followed their face around, attached to a helmet. We captured their facial performance and that data was then stuck onto the digital character and that we incorporated into the digital characters animation. Even we found when we use the facial performance of the actors that we still needed to exaggerate that performance. Because when it was translated onto a digital character, some of the performance was lost even though it was a one-to-one match it's exactly what they did. There's some essence that is lost when you do that translation in a ethereal intangible feeling. The data is one-to-one. It's super accurate. But the example that I had was in the eyebrows. The character's eyebrows felt like they weren't moving enough. So I would go back into those performances in my animations and push them just a little bit or exaggerate those areas so that it would actually look more real. So exaggeration doesn't necessarily mean always breaking reality. It could mean exaggerating something so it looks even more real. That's where you have to understand and train your eye to see properly how the audience will see it and help guide your decisions on how and when and how much to exaggerate these types of animations. Oftentimes in my animation, I'll find that boundary of how much exaggeration is too much by going way big with my exaggeration. Then I can just, in the graph editor that we've seen, I can just scale down the keys towards their default values. It can be a lot faster and a lot quicker to go way beyond the breaking point of exaggeration and then just scale it down until it looks right. Then to constantly add a little bit, add little bit more, add little bit more, add a little bit more, add little bit more to constantly be searching to where that level is just blow way big past it and then you can decide where to come back to. That might be more applicable to something in a digital medium like 3D or 2D digital animation where you have a graph editor and you can scale keys down. That's just a workflow approach that I wanted to share on how I try to achieve exaggeration in my 3D animations. The next animation principle has more to do with drawing, but in spirit, it can be applied to all animation mediums. That's the principle of solid drawing. If we were to translate this principle into something like 3D animation, where there isn't really drawing, you would maybe call it solid posing. The general idea is we want to correctly convey the artistry of the model or the element that we're manipulating in the animation. For drawing, that might mean staying on model. In 3D we also try to stay on model just with different tools. In 2D animation, you might have a model sheet which shows the bounds of expressions or poses that the character can be put in. The same can be true in 3D animation as well. You can know what are the bounds that you can work within to create appealing poses that are true to that character. Because you also have to think if you're working on a TV show or a movie, there's going to be other shots and other animators working on the show, and it's also a way to make sure that there's consistency in the drawing and the draftsmanship and the quality of the artwork and/or on the posing of the character in 3D. Now, you might also hear animator sometimes say they're cheating something to camera. That might just mean that they might be breaking the model in other views as maybe more in 3D animation. They all say they're cheating something to camera. That means they're playing to the frame, they're playing to the camera where maybe if two characters are talking to each other, they may actually point them this way a little bit just so that their eyes and their face are directed towards camera, even though the person they're talking to is maybe just off center of that. That's just an example, and goes to show that, just by saying I'm cheating the camera, doesn't mean you're breaking the solid drawing or solid posing rule. That actually means that you're working within the spirit of that principle, so that you make sure that the appeal and the posing is correct for the frame and the camera. That is all that matters for that animation and the framing of that animation. Finally, we end at the last of the 12, Nine Old Men principles of animation. That principle is appeal. It's basically what all of the other principles are aiming towards. Appeal is one of the most intangible qualities of all of the principles because it's a bit subjective. It basically comes down to, what do people like to see? Another way to think of it is adding a charming quality to your animation. A misinterpretation of appeal might be something like assuming or thinking that the character design of your animation has to always be a handsome character. That a grotesque character can never have appeal. That's just not the case. It's all about what people like or want to see or are captured by and want to see more of. That can include grotesque, scary monsters, as much as it can include cute, fluffy bunnies. Appeal isn't limited to those types of distinctions. Don't think of it in those terms of traditional qualities like that. Appeal can be charming in very simple sense. How oftentimes have you seen a motion graphics animation on a social media platform of some kind where it's like a looping animation and it's just a very simple animation. But just that simplicity and the appealing motion, maybe it's something interesting happening, like something getting sliced in half over and over, who knows what it is, but there's plenty of examples online that people are enraptured by just because of that simple, appealing quality. Now, the color, all of the principles we've talked about up to this point, play into that and help create that appeal. Something to keep in mind is, something that has appeal cannot lack in clarity. It must be clear to the audience for it to have an appealing characteristic. Something can't be unclear and also be appealing. Just doesn't make sense. If we start down the path of trying at least first to be clear because that is a requirement of appealing animation. That clarity will help get us closer and closer to that appealing quality that we're striving for. Appeal isn't always about adding something to your animation. When you look back at all of these principles, if you went through each one and checked off the box and you did each one of these principles, then voila, you'd have an appealing animation. That's not really how it works. It could be about taking away stuff, so reducing the amount of principles you put in. Adding that charm and quality could be adding something unexpected to the animation that we didn't cover here or breaking one of the rules because there are those expectations. Don't just think by adding more stuff or more animation that you'll get closer to appealing animation. It could be the fact that you might need to take elements away from the animation to make them more appealing and clear. Appeal in animation, and as a principle, all depend on the circumstance of your animation and what you're animating, and those elements and how they're arranged, how they're moved, how they're designed. All of these things go in to creating an appealing animation. Now, one of the biggest aspects to evaluate whether it's appealing is to get feedback. That's one of the most precious things about animating is, because you were trying to connect with an audience on some level, we are making it to be seen by someone, and hopefully it's seen in the way that we intended it to be seen. Getting that feedback, especially at an early stage, to see if something is working, can be very helpful and save you a ton of time maybe. So you're not going down a road that someone thinks isn't working, it's too distracting. They aren't looking where you want them to look. Something happens too fast, it's too slow, they're bored. You don't need to just ask other animators, everyone is a consumer of animation and has been watching things long enough to know what they like to see. When you're thinking about appeal, also consider getting feedback from several different people to get eyes on it, because the closer you get and the more time you spend with your animation, the harder it is to take further and further steps back to see what it actually looks like sometimes. That's a very valuable process in animation, is seeking out feedback. Let's review; in this lesson, we discussed four of the last principles of animation. All four of these are about creating clarity in our animation, whereas everything before this, except for the pose-to-pose and straight-ahead principle, were about physics. In this we discussed: staging, exaggeration, solid drawing or solid posing, and appeal, and how all four of those things can help us strive towards creating appealing motion in our animations. Now, the assignment for this lesson is going to be creating the bouncing ball effect. We've been talking around it this entire time and we've used many examples of it. It's a bit of a rite of passage to animate a bouncing ball. Not just rite of passage, but it's something you're going to revisit quite often. One of the first movies I worked on, I worked on Transformers: The Last Knight. In that movie, there's a scene where knights are getting bombarded with catapults of these big fireballs. I'm super excited and proud to be working on my first big visual effects movie. The first thing I get handed is basically the bouncing ball. I animate the mortar balls from the catapults, flying in, hitting the ground. Some of them break, some of them rollover, digit doubles that I also animated in the scene, some of it in slow motion. I really needed to know the principles and the fundamentals of the bouncing ball animation. It's not something you're ever going to escape. The bouncing ball really is involved in a lot of the animations I've done throughout my career in some form or another. The root motion of a character bouncing through a frame. All of these things can go back to trying to get a mastery of the bouncing ball. Never be averse to trying the bouncing ball animation, revisiting it, doing a different take on it, trying to be creative with it. It's one of the fundamental practices that you should be excited about and we're going to do in the next demonstration and mini-project together. Let's do that. We're also going to cover some claymation with that. We are going to cover a new version of stop-motion animation by using clay. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you there. 22. Demo + Assignment 8: Welcome to this assignment where we're going to animate a bouncing ball. We've talked a lot about the bouncing ball to illustrate some of the principles of animation, and now, we're going to animate our own with claymation. I have a piece of clay here, which is important because it's actually plasticine, which means it's not water-based. If you use something like Play-Doh, just be aware that it could dry out and the actual size of your Play-Doh could shrink as the water evaporates from the Play-Doh material. Plasticine is fairly cheap, easy to come by at your hobby store or online. I encourage you to get some because it never hardens. And so you can keep using and reusing it just like a little dirty or you might combine colors or something. It's really nice to have for stop-motion. We have the same setup that we've had before with the app, and we have this piece that's going to help us keep the ball in the air. We're going to remove this in After Effects after the fact. There's a couple of other ideas to keep in mind and common problems I see beginners have when they're doing a bouncing ball. Let's imagine this piece is a cannon that's going to shoot the ball out. If it's moving at a constant rate and it shoots the ball out, the ball should actually land right at the exact same point where the cannon is moving, because they're moving at a constant rate. One of the common problems I see is that beginning animators actually will have an inconsistent rate of forward motion with a bouncing ball. It'll slow down in midair drastically, which doesn't make sense physically, so look out for that. The other thing is that we want to slow in and slow out on the peaks of the bouncing ball, as we've seen in previous examples, and that each successive bounce of the ball is going to be less than the one before. The bounce is going to get shorter and shorter and shorter. We're going to animate two bounces together, and I'd like for you to finish your own version of this. One of the big things we need to do with the app, I believe it might be a pro feature, so you might have to put down a couple of dollars to have access to this feature. But I also just wanted to discuss how the app works and some photography ideas to keep in mind. Let me hit "Record" on the iPhone, and we'll get started. Now that we're in the app, I'm going to click on "My Project", and I'm going to go into the Settings of the camera. Now that we're in the Settings, I'm going to go to the bottom right button here to pull up the Exposure Settings here. It's automatically by default on auto. The problem you get with that is you'll have a flicker when we try to remove this piece of clay from the background. Because each time the camera takes a picture, it's going to set the exposure, it's going to set the white balance, and so you could have a difference in each frame because you're letting the camera determine it every time it's taking a picture. We want to set it one time and have it consistent for every photograph, and it will make it easier to remove this, so there's no flickering of color or exposure on the background that we're going to replace this with. We need to go to the Manual Settings here for M, and go over to white balance, make sure one of these is on, and it looks good for the setting that you're in. We can just have the exposure be set, so it's already on settings that work for what it is. We're on the right camera, so I'm going to hit "Done". Now, we're going to have consistent photographs. There's going to be no flickering, there's going to be no white balance changes from frame to frame. Let's get started with our first image. We want to get a clean plate, so we want to move out of the way and have no clay on the screen because we can use this later as a clean plate to help remove this piece of clay. I'm just going to take a few images there, and also we want to make sure we don't move this around. I'm going to use this pad here, it's maybe 15, 20 bucks to help measure and have a consistent distance as we move through the frame. You might want to also lay down reference points every time that you're moving the clay. In between shots, you could put down a piece of clay to mark where it was so that you can help measure the distance if you don't have a mat length is for yourself. I'm going to choose a place to begin, and the whole idea is we want to set the highest mark of where we want the ball to start from. I'm going to make sure the ball is barely on frame, so our eye has a moment to register it's coming into frame. You want just a sliver of the ball in frame here. Keep a mental note of how high it is because we never want to get back to that height. That's going to be as high as the ball ever gets. I'm going to move away and take a picture, and be careful not to move the camera while I'm doing it. I'm going to slide back in, move the ball one square forward here on my mat, and then I can just push the clay down to help ease out the bounce. Then slide out of the way and keep going. Go one square forward and move the ball further down than I did the last time. It's really starting to come down. Move the ball one square forward again, and we can also rotate the ball as we're taking photos, so it's not entirely still in the same orientation to camera. There we go. I've really squashed this down. The next frame is going to be my stretch frame, going into the squash and stretch portion of the bounce. I'm going to hit "Picture" here. I'm just holding my finger here, so I keep track of where everything was. I can make a little bit of a stretch pose with the clay, I'll set it here for the contact position. Because this is coming in from the highest height, this will be the most stretch that we're going to have of any of the bounces. I'll move out of the way, take a picture. I'm going to have the squash position. I'm watching the onion skin to make sure I'm sintering the squash on where the contact was, and now, we can start the bounce out. We want another stretch pose here because it accelerates out of the bounce. As we get into the top of the next bounce, we want it to be lower than the previous one. We need to keep that in mind as we begin the bounce upward, I'm going to roll this back into a ball shape for the next frame. I'm going to push this down just a little bit. Keep an eye on the forward motion. We don't want it to slow down or speed up. We want it to be fairly consistent moving forward. I'm going to have maybe three frames of it easing in. Let's move it one little block forward here, and then I'm going to push and squeeze the white clay up, so it can start easing in. Keeping in mind, we don't want to go higher than how the ball entered. That's as high as we ever want to go. I just want to check the lines on my mat to make sure I'm not moving the mat between frames. Very gently take a picture, move the white clay one square forward, then squeeze the light clay so it's going up. Rotate the ball a little bit. The next frame will be the peak of that bounce. I'm just going to move one square forward again, and just squeeze the white clay up just a little bit and rotate the ball. This is the height of our jump. We want to remember this height too, because we don't want to go higher than this the next time as well. I'm looking at the features of the app itself to use it as measurements on screen as well. I know that's in line with the stopwatch icon here, so I don't need to go higher than that on the next bounce. We're going to start coming down, and this is basically the process to repeat until the ball bounces of a frame. You have all the information now to finish this out for yourself, and I'm going to see what you make and have some fun with it. Get comfortable with just a normal bounce before you do anything too crazy because you don't want to get sidetracked by trying to plus it and do fancy things before you have the basics down. Do a basic one first and then maybe have some fun with it. I'm going to finish this out and speed this up, and then I will see you in a second inside of After Effects, where we can remove the white clay from our animation. I'll see you in one second. Now that we've finished the last frame, I'm going to take a few pictures of the background again so that the animation ends not so abruptly as soon as the ball is exiting frame. Now that we've finished the animation, let's take a look at it and export it so that we can use it in After Effects to remove the white clay. I'm just going to back out to be able to play the animation. It looks pretty good. Nothing moved, the ground didn't move. It looks like there's some flickering, and I think it's from the chair. I think it's from the reflection. If you look in the bottom right where the green meets the wall, I think it's from my chair blocking the light in different ways. So just keep an eye out for that, but it's not too dramatic that it won't mess us up to bad. Let's export this to the computer. I want to back out to the menu and then choose select, and then select that project, hit the box with an arrow here. I don't want it GIF, I want it as a export movie. Then I'm just going to export it to my computer, and now we can finish that. I'm going to jump inside of After Effects. Now that we're in After Effects, we can remove the white clay. Let's start by clicking and dragging this file into a new composition by hovering over this little square down here and letting go. Now, we have a new composition. I want to fit it to frame by hitting Shift Question Mark, and then we can scrub through and see where we need to start removing the clay here. I'm going to scrub for because we have this yellow area here that's from, I think, my chair reflecting off of the light and then back onto the wall, and it's changing a little bit. Let's choose a frame further along that's a bit more consistent. Let's choose one right in here. I'm going to duplicate this layer by hitting Command D or Control D, and I'm going to right-click on it and go to time, freeze frame. I'm going to turn off the layer by hitting the sound off and the eyeball off, and then I'm just going to scrub back to the frame that we need it on. I'm going to start with this frame here, and I want to hit G to pull up the mask tool so we can start drawing a mask with this layer selected here. All I have to do is click and drag, and I can start drawing a little mask around this area that we need to eliminate. Now, if I were to turn this back on with the eye icon here, we can see that we've removed that piece of clay, and that's basically going to be the process we're going to repeat over and over. You can either animate the mask by going toggling down masks or you can hit MM twice on the keyboard to pull up all the options here and hit the stopwatch next to mask path. We could animate this path or we could create a new layer for every frame. That's the way I'm going to do it just so that I have a bit more freedom and I'm not stuck to just those four points of a mask or a bunch of messy masks. I'm going to duplicate this layer. But first, I want to isolated just to that frame. I'm going to hit Alt and then bracket left and bracket right, so now we can bring those down. We can also just click and drag those down here, but I'm going to hit Alt and bracket. It's just a lot quicker that way. Hit M to put the mask and delete that mask so I can start over with this new layer. Now I can create a new mask, hitting G, and click and drag as I need it to be drawn out around this shape. Now when we start to go around the ball, we might need more pieces to describe that area, more pieces of the mask rather to help to find that area around the white clay. If I turn this on, we can see it's working pretty well. We might see some pretty hard edges here. So one way around that is toggle down mask and then just to increase the feather. I'm going to hit eight here, and that helps to blend those two together. We might also need to choose a different frame later on. When I duplicate this and drag it forward here, and then instead of having to deal with keyframes, I can just use these new layers. I can even just hit V and then double-click to grab all of them and then just move them all down. I'm going to hit V, click off, and then now I can select individual points and just adjust this. We can see there's a slight difference here, so I might need to choose a better image here in a moment. That's just the general issues you're going to run into when you're trying to replace the white clay. We could use this frame as well. We can duplicate this and use this instead. I'm going to freeze frame. While the scrubber is on that frame, we're going to freeze frame here and then just pull this up to the top so I can keep track of the layers. Hit Alt bracket to isolate it to that point. Turn it off so I can see the layers beneath it and delete this one because that difference was a little too much for my taste. I want to make sure I keep having the layer selected, otherwise I'm going to create a shape. So if you start creating a shape, that creates a new layer. That's because you don't have this layer selected. It doesn't know that you want to draw the mask on this layer. That is basically how we can erase the white clay from this animation. I hit V, click off, and then back on to select an individual point, and then I'm going to go into the feather properties. The other way you can do it is also hit G twice, so you pull up this little feather tool. We can click and drag on this to create a different feather distances on different points. Around the ball, if we want it to be a lot closer, we can actually pull that down around the ball. Now when we click off, we can see it's a lot cleaner than the other areas. It's a lot smoother around here. Let's do that again for this frame, and I duplicate this top layer because that one worked pretty well. Hit V to pull the selection tool and then just bring this down. Hit Enter to finish moving it, click away, and then I can select individual points here. If I don't click away, then I'm not deselecting the entire mask. I want to deselect the entire mask so I can have some more room to play. I also don't want to be removing parts of the image that I don't need to be. Hold down the Spacebar to get the hand tool, and then come back up here and then just remove that area here. You can get the gist of where this is going, that we need to remove every frame where this existed and then also deal with the mask itself because the mask needs to be feathered at different rates or different amounts around the ball. It needs to be very close to the ball here and then very spread out everywhere else to help blend it into the background here. That hitting the G tool twice, the G shortcut, will be very helpful for that. I'm just going to speed this up, so you can see the finished product because it is a little bit time consuming, and I will see you in a second. [MUSIC] Now that we've removed the white clay from this animation, we can add two more things to it if we wanted to enhance it just a little bit more, and that would be the shadow and some motion blur. First, let's cover the shadow. Let's right-click in the gray area, go to New, Solid, choose a black color here, and hit okay. Now I'm going to choose the elliptical tool here, click and drag underneath this, and I'm going to hold down the space bar to position it and let go. We can actually just animate this mask, I'm going to hit a key frame here on the Mask Path, I'm going to increase the feather just a little bit, and go through this animation to have it follow the sphere. One thing for us to be able to position it correctly, we need to know what the position is vertically in the frame. I'm going to move this to where it should be, and we're going to reduce the transparency so it matches what's in frame there. I'm going to zoom in with Command Plus or Control Plus. I'm going to turn this off for one second so I can see the outline of this, and I'm just going to drag this to match the outline of the actual shadow here, and I'm going to turn this back on by hitting the I here, hit T, and then I'm just going to drop the transparency way down. I'm going to drag this over to the side so we can see if we can match that type of shadow here. So it looks like the feather of the mask is a lot. So I'm going to hit MM to pull up all the mask stuff, hit 12 here to reduce the feather, and that's looking pretty close. So what I'm going to do is now go through the animation and where there are frames of it all floating in the air I can have this underneath the sphere. I want to make sure it's in line with where it's going to contact the ground here. So I can see it's on this yellow line is where the shadow should be. So we have it here, we can go back to where it should be. I'm just going to delete this first key frame that we made, and then just move it backward. I'm clicking and dragging this, I'm going to hold down shift so it will horizontally snap, and only move in that direction, so now we have a pretty consistent animation here. It's auto Key framing, so every time I move it, it's setting a key frame for me. I want to get rid of this on a frames that the shadow is actually there. So a frame like this I'm going to hit T, pop opacity. I'm just going to animate the opacity down to zero here. So I'm going to go back one one click another key frame, jump back to wear it should be off, turn it to zero. Then we can do the same when we need it to turn back on. So I'm going to copy this frame, paste it in, turn off the one before it. Then we can move the mask by double-clicking it, and then holding down Shift to drag it horizontally where it needs to go. Let's jump to this frame and just match this up, and then we can copy and paste the key frames here to turn it off and drag it in line with where it needs to turn off, and then drag it to where it needs to turn back on. I'm just Shift, dragging again so that it's in the right spot. I'll do the same thing here. It looks like we're running out of room on the solid here for some reason. It looks like maybe I positioned the actual solid itself. That was a mistake on my part. I can just key frame that here and key frame it here and then just move it over, and then pick back up with the mask animation here. So I'm going to hit U on the keyboard and it will pull up all the key frames, and then I can just drag this through again and then hit T. So I'm copying and pasting only the opacity key frames. Copy-paste, drag this inline so we're getting rid of it on the frame that needs to get rid of, and I'm going to delete that one because we're turning it right back on and right after that frame. Now I can click and drag this over. I can do the same thing here, and now it's going to be off frame completely. We can just end this layer here, Alt, the right bracket, and now it'll turn off. So we can finish the first part of this as well, and we can also add some motion blur to this if we wanted by adding an adjustment layer, right-clicking New, Adjustment Layer, making sure it's on top and then adding a directional blur to the adjustment layer, and then we can increase the blur length and we can change the direction. Let's just go really far with it, and then we can add a mask to this layer so it's only affecting the sphere itself. Those are just a couple of tricks to enhance this animation. I look forward to seeing what you make, don't feel like you have to go this far with it. It's just fun to play around in After Effects and see how far you can take it. In the next lesson, we're going to cover some next steps and some of my own insights into your journey as an animator. Thanks for watching. 23. Next Steps: Now that you've finished all of the lectures of learning about the principles of animation, and you've used each assignment to put them into practice, and the many projects and the assignments that you've had. Now, it's times revisit the assignment of animating the line. I want you to get creative with it and use one or all or some of the principles that we've learned to now animate a line and see how creative you can get with it. Use any of the mediums of animation that we've used so far in the course, or any you've found. Really go wild with it and I look forward to seeing what you make, please share it with me, and I want to see the progression of the first one and now the one that you've completed the course. I wanted to take a quick moment to discuss some principles not covered in the nine old men of Disney's coined principles. Things I've learned that has helped me, and I just want to rattle them off here. Things to think about as you continue on your journey. Think about contrast and think about rhythm in terms of contrast, the scene as a whole of what you're animating. Because if you imagine your favorite song, your favorite song doesn't have a consistent repetitive. It's not a drum that you just bang over and over. That's no one's favorite song. There's contrast, there's slow, there's fast, there's loud, they're soft, and that type of texture can be put into your animation as well. One thing I like to do when I block out and start my animation or plan it out. I try to think, are the main beats happening at even intervals in time? Is that too even, not just in the spacing, but also on the timing? Is everything happening on the same beat if you will? It's good to help vary that up to just create visual interest and also think in terms of the actual sound of the animation as well. That'll help you time it out, and if you need to add sound effects, if there's music, if there's dialogue, anything like that will help you also figure out the timing and how to add that contrast at an early stage. One thing that I enjoy about animations so much, is that you have to flex your skills of observation. Get curious about everything around you, and especially with things that interest you, whether it's in film, TV, people playing in the park, whatever it is. When you see something interesting, don't just let that opportunity pass you by. Stop to evaluate what is it that you like about that? What is it that caught your attention? Because you can start to build a mental library of things that you can start to put into your animations. Little quirks, little characteristics, things that make something feel authentic and get curious about the world around you, and get out there and observe life and live your own life. Because one of the charm their wanted to impact upon you is proprioception. That's basically having the embodiment idea of motion and having that experience yourself. I grew up being a bit of an athlete, so I used my body so I could understand once I got into animation, how my own body moves and the timing and the expectations, and so when I began animating, I could easily spot when things were too slow or too fast. That's also something to watch out in the next stage of your development, is either animation is so hard. Sometimes beginners will want to speed right through their animation. They won't spend as much time as they should on the actual frames. They won't have enough time for something to play out, so things move too fast. The converse of that is once you start to really enjoy these concepts, you might actually over animate something and spend way too long on a portion of the animation. Not just in your time of effort, but in the time of it playing back. So be careful of those two extremes, and always think about what's best for the scene, and not necessarily what you enjoy doing for the effort, because the result is going to be what the audience sees. That's what we're always striving for, is the best appeal for the audience. If you watched movies like Hotel Transylvania, for example, or Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. They have, for comedic effect sometimes just very limited animation. You're not over animating things. You always want to make sure you're doing what's appropriate for the scene that you're in or you're trying to accomplish. Always look out for those two extremes of overestimating something, or animating too quickly through something just because you know it's too hard, and you're trying to just get through it. Look out for those two barriers to progressing to the next level. The last bit of information we need to cover are next steps on your journey as you develop as an animator, because it's a never ending journey of learning, and I'm constantly learning and relearning. Because that's why I was interested in this as a craft. Because it's never ending, you can always be better and learn something and put into practice what you've learned over and over and always learn something else. The next steps for you after learning these principles are just the beginning, so I have courses in After Effects. If you want to pursue 2D digital animation, and learning how to do some motion graphics, animated characters. All of that I teach in After Effects as well, and if you want to pursue 3D animation, I have a ton of classes on that, one huge long course series for beginners. I encourage you to check out as well as more coming soon. If you're interested in animation as a career path, I also have a course that discusses getting into the animation industry at length, so that you can start to build your expectations of what's expected to get into the industry if you wanted to do this as a full time job like I do. Thanks for watching and check out those other classes. If you have a moment, please leave me some feedback so I know what you think about this course and how I can improve if there's room to improve here. Because as an animator I'm always trying to improve as well as an instructor, I also try to improve. Thanks for your help there and I really appreciate you taking the time and trust to letting me help you along your journey becoming an animator just a little bit. Keep going, keep animating. I'll see you next time. Thanks for watching.