Transcripts
1. Intro to Principles of Animation: Have you ever wondered what makes Disney animation looks so good? You see, back in the 19 thirties and animation was really starting to take off their these nine guys working for Disney that we call the nine old Men now they worked really hard trying to figure out what makes animation look good Now. In the 19 eighties, two of these nine old men, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, took these techniques that they had developed over decades with their friends and codify them into what we call the 12 principles of animation. Now the cool thing about these principles, as this is that they are timeless. They still hold true today across all kinds of disciplines, cultures and countries. You'll see these techniques used across a whole variety of styles, and they still applied in motion graphics, which I think is pretty cool. So as we dive in and look at these techniques as they applied in motion graphics, I guarantee you that they will improve your abilities. But we're gonna be taking these same principles and applying them across styles across genres, across cultures. We're gonna be looking at how to use them in good motion graphics animation. There are a lot of great tutorials out there to show you how to do all kinds of really cool effects techniques and really cool animation projects. But I think a lot of them failed to really get down to the core to demonstrate how good animation stands out from bad animation. Now we're gonna be applying these techniques that I teach you immediately in a project called a Ball Bounce. Now that may seem really simple, but this is the first project that you do in any animation school because it is deceptively simple. A lot like when you go to culinary school, the very first thing they teach you to do is make an omelet. Now anyone can make an omelet, but it's a very highly technical thing, and there are a lot of simple techniques that people get wrong. So in the same way, although we're gonna be doing what might seem simple, we're gonna be taking these 12 principles of animation and applying them every step of the way so you can see why your ball bounce looks a lot better than an amateur ball bounce. By the end, you're gonna have a really cool project to show that hopefully will be unique. That will demonstrate the abilities that you've learned and you'll be able to apply. Going forward, even another tutorials you watch. You'll be able to apply these animation techniques to make sure that your project is as good as it can be, and it will really stand apart from the competition. I've seen a whole span of different projects, even professional projects that fail to take into account these basic principles of animation. Hi, my name is Justin. I have a degree in computer animation from Ringling College of Art and Design with a minor and film. I've been working on my own studio for about three year that in full time freelance motion graphics, I teach part time at Chapman University teaching motion designed to a graphic design. Seniors and I also worked in advertising video games on a whole variety of projects there. No, Although this course is a beginner course, I will expect you to have at least a little bit of working knowledge of after effects will be explaining what I do along the way, but I am gonna move rather quickly, so if it's a little bit too fast. Feel free to rewind and take things slow as I explain what I'm doing. So if you're ready to make something cool and learn a lot in the process and learn something that will spend multiple projects and this is the course for you, come on and join me as I show you how to make some really cool animation.
2. Squash and Stretch: Hello, everybody. Welcome to my course. Thank you for joining me. I'm going to get right into it. Here. I got Adobe after effects open. We're gonna be talking about the 12 principles of animation. And the very 1st 1 on most of these lists is squash and stretch. Now, I I reorder these a little bit just for the purposes of our project. Ah, but typically, the 1st 1 that you learn is called squash and stretch. This is the project. We're gonna be aiming for something like this. By the end, of course, you can add your own flair to it. You can change the colors, change the background. You can add any number of things to this, and I'm gonna show you how to do that. But the principles will all be the same. So when we're talking about squash and stretch, essentially what that means is when something is moving very quickly, it tends to a long gait on when something is coming to very abrupt halt, it tends to compress. So you've got squashing in the stretching and and what this does when you exaggerate it in animation gives things, um, a little bit more punch to the animation and I'll show you a little example right here. So at the top here, I've got just the ball, just moving back and forth with no squashing and no stretching. But you can see hopefully on the bottom bowl. I have a little bit of squash animation in between, so as it's speeding up, you can see it at the fastest point. Uh, they start together right here, right the same size as the ball's move. Quickly, they speed up there about maximum speed right here. This bull and I exaggerated it quite a bit. But this ball here, the bottom is stretched out quite a bit, and so that creates a really nice, appealing illusion of maybe some motion blur. Or maybe it is squashing in reality. But in any case, that adds a lot to just the character of the animation. Yes, the ball on the top. Maybe more realistic. Maybe it's a golf ball or something, but even if you're animating ah, hard ball or or something like that, you would still want to give it a little bit of squash as it's moving extremely fast to give the I that illusion because when we're talking about animation, you're not actually watching motion, right? You're watching individual frames one by one, and when you watch 24 of these back to back in a second, your brain creates the illusion of motion. Your brain is used to processing images one of the time in a large string and perceiving motion out of that. So that is what animation is. We've got this this stretch element to really highlight that movement, and conversely, if it reaches the end here, you could even do like a little bit of, Ah, a little bit of a squash just to really show that it's slowing down and maybe squashing a little bit. And I'll go through the tech technical aspects of how this all works as well. So let's take a look just visually before we get in about what squashing stretch is gonna look like so you can see here sort of a classic little illustration here where Ah, the ball on the left has ism in a bit. The ball on the left has no squash and stretch. Maybe it's realistic, but it's not very interesting, and the one over here is a lot more character, right? Ah, the top. It's ah regular perfect circular shape as it speeds up on the Ark. It's coming down and is very elongated, and here at the bottom, it's squashed because it has impacted the ground. And then again, as it bounces up in gains, this momentum back it. Ah, it increases in its stretch and then levels out here at the top. So this is what we're going for as well as, ah, circles, which is what we're using to illustrate here. This could be used and should be used across all the animation projects for characters as well. So you look, uh, see me, find a good example your for here, for instance, If a character is jumping right, you see the stretch pose right before he hits the ground, and then he sort of compresses here at the bottom. This is sort of an exaggerated example, but you get the idea that the stretch here and then the squash as the impacts and then the stretch again as he stretches back. So let's put this into practice and see how we can add this to our motion design and after effects. Ah, we've got a real basic ball here. And I will include this simple layout project in the course. Um, but it's just a simple out gray background. Great ground. Feel free to change these colors as you see fit. These were just ah, these air just shape layers that I that I set up. You can add whatever design you want these they're just for reference. Ah, I'm gonna take these ground on background layers, highlight them both. And I'm gonna hit the lock button just so I don't accidentally select them because this ball is really what we're gonna be animating. Okay, so what we want to do is make the ball go up. I want to make the ball go up and down. So we're going to start here. Let's hit P and now will open up our position. Sick. I just do this briefly. Ah, it's Ah, Hit, Pete. Open up position. Hit the little stopwatch here, and that will create a key frame for us. And we want this to go to start here, to go up and then to go back down. So since we know it's gonna end right where it started, I'm just going to go forward to, um say a second and 1/2 about there. Maybe a second and some change and I'll hit the position key frame again. Just so we know those air this that's a starting point. And that's the ending point. I'll go to the midpoint here around 13 14 frames, and I'm going to grab the ball and move it up. If you hold a shift, you can keep it anchored to one dimension. So you just go straight up. And now we've got a simple animation. I'm actually gonna So if you hit play that you had, ah, Space bar that I'll give you a playback. I want to shorten this play area so that it's not giving me all this blank space over here . We may use this in the future, but for now, this will be fine. Okay, so there we go. We got something real basic. It's not anything amazing just yet, but we will get there before long. So let's see what we can do to add some squash and stretch. So, like I said, we want to, um, have it stretched during its fastest moment, and we wanted to have it squash when it hits the ground. Eso The main thing you're looking to animate is the scale property. When you're talking about squash and stretch for an object like this So let's go ahead and hit s that will open up the scale property. I'm gonna hit the key frame on that the stopwatch to make a key frame. But I also want to see my position key frame. So I know when the ball is actually hitting. So I'm going Teoh, go ahead and hit you and that will show us all our key frames that we're working with here . Okay, So, squash. I wanted to be perfectly round here at the bottom. Ah, as it speeds up right here in the middle somewhere, I wanted to be at its longest point, so I wanted to be sort of stretched. Now the thing about squashing and stretching is when something compresses like a ball. You can see something's not quite right about this, right, because it's just shrinking in one direction. And that's because when something squashes, it needs to retain its volume. So if it squashes in one direction, it needs to stretch in the opposite direction in a relatively equal amount. So I'm just gonna as I scale it down in one direction for the squash. I'm gonna stretch it here in the other direction. This is quite exaggerated. It's probably too much, but it's a good place to start. So there we go. It's going up. When it gets to the top, it should start to regain it shapes. I'm just gonna take this first key frame down here. Select it. Hit control C on control V to paste. Now that's command. See your command V if you're on a Mac. So now we've got it's going up, and we're gonna do the same thing in reverse. So let's go halfway. Since we already have the shape, I'm just gonna copy paste that scale a key frame, their paste, it here and something about Ah, The impact that you should really know is that when a ball is about to hit the ground, it should be stretched as much as it can possibly be stretched right, because as it's coming to the ground, it is the fastest. It's going to be the frame before it hits the ground, if that makes any sense. So we really want this stretch to actually be right here. And then as the ball hits, we want this to immediately squash. So let's go ahead and do. The reverse is to a squash squash scale key for him here, and it's not quite touching the ground. So let's go ahead and lower this to the ground. And we actually need on this on the squash frame on the stretch frame here. We need this to be barely touching the ground. I'm gonna move this back up a swell. You can see it's creating key frame is down here. We've got a couple of position key frames. This is fine to have them clustered this close because it is a very integral part of the animation. It's going up stretching out and impacting, and we needed to reset to its main position. I'm gonna expand my work area here of it, and we needed to After it bounces. We need it to recoil, so to speak to it's default. So I'm just gonna since I know the default is these key friends back here, I'm just going to save some time and highlight those copy and paste those as well. Now we've got the squash and stretch down. But there are some some very key elements that were missing, and I'm going to go over those in the next lesson. You might notice that it feels a bit robotic, and I'm gonna teach you why. It's not quite looking right, even though we have some pretty good squash and stretch going on. So stay tuned for the next lesson, and we'll get into that.
3. Slow In and Slow Out: Okay. The second principle on the 12 principles of animation is called slow in and slow out, or sometimes called Easing in and easing out. And what that means is all your key frames. You don't want them to be equally spaced. So when I select my ball, if you zoom in a bit, you can see each of these little tiny dots here that represents a key frame, and you can see they're very evenly spaced. And that is exactly why this feels so robotic, because that this is not how things moving a reality in reality. When you're beginning emotion, you tend to accelerate into emotion. Things start slow and they get gradually quicker. And likewise, as things are slowing down, they don't just come to an abrupt halt unless it's, ah, a bullet hitting a target or, ah, car hitting a wall or something like that or the ball hitting the ground. Typically, they slow into their position. So in order to create natural organic motion, what we're looking to do is add easing in and easing out on aftereffects. That's very easy to Dio. You just highlight the key frames you want to ease and you hit F nine. So let's see, for instance, when it gets to the top of our peak here on gravity takes over. We really want this ball to be easing into that position, so I'm just gonna grab these key frames and hit F nine. Now you'll see they change sort of their shape in that little shape. That little hourglass shape means that they're eased when the little diamond shape by default. That means that they're linear key frames, which means each frame in between is going to be evenly spaced. But the F nine r the Eazy e's. This means that they are nice and smooth, so you will see as they play. It's kind of smoothed into the top like that, which is how we want it. And if I slipped my ball here, zoom in. You should be able to even see these air spaced evenly, evenly, and then they gradually become closer and closer together, which means they are moving slower. The ball is moving slower and slower as it reaches its peak, and the same thing here as it reaches the ground that see it should be going as fast as possible. So we actually want these to be linear, but then as it hits, we do want this to ease back into its position. So let's select all of these key friends here and hit F nine. Right now, we have a really harsh squash here, and I think that's fine. But we needed to move a little faster if we're gonna were to make the you are believed that the ball is really squashing that much. We really need to speed up this animation. So I'm just gonna take all these key frames here and just move them all over. Cool. That's looking pretty good. And we're ready to some timing changes as we go forward a bit. But this is a good place to start. Remember, your easing makes things feel more organic, so you can exaggerate this effect and I'll show you the difference here. Let's let's do a little Ah little experiment here. So if I make this bottom one here linear, you can see how boring this one isn't in on the bottom here, right? Very robotic, very Metrodome like this. Top one has a little bit more character because it's being eased. That's the idea. Now we can take this again and really exaggerate it If I make 1/3 copy moving up to the top here, there is a way to do this. It is a little bit Ah, a little bit scary, but I'll take you through it. And don't get too scared. This is just a good little primer on after effects. If you hit this little button here, this graph editor, it'll take you into this crazy world. Now what you're looking at is the acceleration graph. So you can see for this ball the top, it starts out rather slow. And then here in the middle, it speeds up very rapidly and then eases back in. And then as it's returning, it does the exact same thing. Now, if you what happens if you select one of these little key frames down here is you get these yellow handles on these yellow handles that you control. If you move them back and forth on if you hold shift, it will stay locked. It will let you control these spacing of those key frames, and you can even see as I'm doing that, their spacing out differently up here. So if you stretch it to the right here and stretch just went in. You get this really sharp curve. This means I'm really, really exaggerating that, uh, that easing and I'll show I'll show you on this end to All right. So if I do something like that, you can see the difference between all three. This bottom one is linear. This middle one is my default Eazy e's, which means all I did was hit F nine and those key frames and this top wanted really whipping fast because I really cranked up the easing on that. Uh, maybe that's a bit much. It really depends on what your project calls for. But I just wanted to show you a little bit about how you can affect the timing of your easing to be a little bit more snappy and this course sort of snappy animations really popular. It really holds true today. It really makes things more interesting. And you can imagine if I added some, even some squash and stretch in here to this motion, how you could really feel the snap of that ball. And obviously there is a breaking point for this. I could I could really, really push it so that it's just insanely sharp. Come on. Well, do undo, undo. It could really push this so that yet look, thes points are crazy, But now, see, it's sort of moving so fast that you almost you almost can't tell the motion because it's a little bit too much. So So there is a break point for that, but you can see how spaced out these key frames are. As I zoom in here, they're very bunched up because it's moving very, very slow, and they're getting gradually whiter and whiter until here's a key frame band as the next one. It's completely over here, so the illusion is that it's moving extremely quickly here in the middle. So if we bring it back to here, we can highlight thes top key frames. And I wanted to just I wanted a hang in the air a little bit longer and really ease into that position. So I'm going to select those key frames, the scale on the position, and I'm gonna hit my graph editor and let's go ahead and here and not looking at the right graph here. Should be speed. If you're looking at something messy like this. You might need to go down here, change this graph from value to speed. We're looking at speed. That's what we're looking to do. So let's take the position. And we really wanted to. Here we go. Now you can see you've got a lot more character here. I want to really easy slope Gen gradually down here at the bottom and I make maybe exaggerate that a bit more. That's pretty good. I suspect if I pushed it much further, would look a little bit too. A little bit too crazy. We're going pretty card cartoony here. Obviously, the more you push this, the more cartoony it's gonna look. And when you want to go back, you just hit the graph editor button again. Okay, so there is your primer on Easy, easy to get nice organic shapes. A nice organic movement looks a lot more natural, feels a lot more convincing on as we move forward. We will look at how we can make this even more interesting.
4. Anticipation and Follow-through: Okay, So in this next section, I'm going to highlight three principles in one, and that is anticipation. Follow through an overlapping action because they all sort of tie into the same principle. And that is that when motion stops, it doesn't just stop things continue through. And you know this intuitively, if you think about how how movement works, like let's look at this, for instance, this is the idea of anticipation. The man doesn't just jump, right? He first crouches into a position. Or maybe you put a foot back. Or maybe you you rear up for you. You get your muscles prepare, you crouched down, and then you push and any launch into the air, and then you compresses are squash motion here and then you recoil. And that's sort of the recovery. Or you might call that the follow through as you hit and then you recoil your your limbs come back into place. So we're gonna take this principle and apply this to our ball. So what we want to do is rather than have our ball just randomly leave the ground, we want him to squash down as if he's in sort of an anticipation and you notice, even using the word he because I'm starting to give this ball character. That's the goal is to take this from inanimate object to something that feels like it has life. And that's really what That's how Disney animation is so good because they know how to take things Onda and make you care about them. Turn them from just moving pictures into an actual character. That's really the goal to the good motion graphics and good animation in general. So, uh, first we need a little bit of space on this end because we, uh, don't have any room to have ah, in anticipation. So I'm gonna take all these key frames here. I'm just gonna drag them over about food, say eight frames to give us some extra space here. So now it sits on the ground for a bit, and then it goes up. Ah, the other thing is, right now we have our key. We have our pivot point here in the center of a ball, which isn't super useful because really, we want we want this to be a the bottom of the ball where it's contacting the ground in this case, so there's an easy way to adjust that. And the way to do that is to hit the the key A. That will bring up your anchor point. And we're just gonna grab this value here and click it and drag it to the positive direction until that little pivot point there is lined up somewhere around your base, the base of your bowl, and you can zoom in and see right around there. That'll really help us now that has messed up our animation a bit, and I'll show you how to fix that. But if you hit you, you'll see your key frames again. And now our ball is sort of floating, which isn't Grace. I'm going to go to one of these key frames, just hit the position words, and that will select all of our key frames, and now we can move them all at once. So if you just grab the Y direction here for a position, weaken, drag the position back down to the ground. So we are grounded once again. But now our pivot is nice and safe. I may notice our squash and stretch has been messed up here at the end of it, we can just adjust that this is supposed to be our stretch position. It should be touching. Whenever you're doing a stretch before impact, it should be touching the moment before it before it squashes. This is just a common practice. You can even see it in this image. His his heels here are touching the ground. And then the very next framework sequence of frames is the compression. They squash positions the same thing here it hits, then it squashes. And again, it needs to be on this a justice a bit. It's my fault for not showing you this earlier and squash and then recovery. All right, so we got an anchor point move so we can do a proper anticipation. Since he starts in this position. Let's ah, key frame this this hold position here at the beginning by hitting these little empty key frames appear that'll create some new key frames and we want this to right around here. We want us to let's see compressed down to right here. So let's take this and give it a nice anticipation. We're gonna use the principles of squash and stretch again to demonstrate anticipation as if the ball is getting ready to jump. He's like pushing off here. Now, that's pretty good. But we have to say we have a new problem now because now it pushes off and it's still a bit squashed, which is not what we want. So we're gonna do similar to what we did here on this end is we're gonna have not only the stretch position. Um, not only the compression position at the landing will be the frame before it hits, but same thing ever here. We want the full stretch to be immediate. So let's move this stretch key frame all the way here to the beginning. Make sure that this guy is touching the ground as he leaves, and that will really give us the sense that he is pushing off and also by default. It looks like it has made this position key frame on these key frame which we don't want. We really want this toe, Teoh launch off. So let's ah, hold control or I believe, command. If you're on, if you're on a Mac and click that key frame and that will just make it linear again, So it's nice and punchy. The linear key frame will always give you sort of punchy feel. You go now in this anticipation, we do want to ease in. We don't want this to all be linear either. So let's take these first this first set of key frames and select them and hit F nine. That will give us a nice ease and that push off. Now you can see I did exaggerated a bit to make it feel really snappy. But this is the idea of anticipation. We've got a nice little the ball is preparing to launch and then just launches off. And that gives a really good feel of ah, of intent but also makes the motion feel natural. Like motion is not just occurring in a vacuum. There is. There was always a before and an after eso. The next idea is follow through, and so we've done follow through a bit already where sort of recoils into its position. But maybe there's a secondary bounce that seems like it would be possible, right? So it's make it as it comes back up. We will make this float a bit, so it just takes another little hop and then we'll go back down to the beginning position that's a bit slow. So I'm now gonna compress these a bit. So it's not so floaty, and this will get into timing, which we'll talk about later. And that's not bad. I think maybe it comes up a little bit too high, so I'm just gonna go here and blow it down a bit. Now you might have noticed I didn't add any squash and stretch. And that's because this happens so quickly that, you know, maybe I should actually ease up on this squash. So it's not so crazy. Maybe it goes right back to its position here. Here we go. You don't want it to be floating and compressed. That doesn't make any sense. So when it if it's in midair, probably should not be compressed it all. And if it's moving this slowly, it's probably not going to stretch that much. You could probably do a little stretch, but probably not necessary over the course of 1 to 3 frames here, and I would also advise against doing too much of this. What I've done here, which is sort of a one off key framed to do a single correction like that. Generally you can see have kept everything nice and orderly posed by pose. You've got the base position, their anticipation. They launch the height, the stretch position, the collapse position, the bounce and then the recoil. So they all have different roles to play. I don't have a bunch of tiny key frames into your trying to course. Correct. I'm trying to keep it all nice and neat. Cool. Okay, The final part of what we're talking about here is overlapping action, and this is sort of the same principle on in order to do overlapping action, this might be something like, uh maybe in arms or cloth. So if you're running on and you stop suddenly, maybe you're wearing a jacket or something. Your your jacket will continue to go in the direction you were running before settling down . Or if you have ah, necklace on or something dangling something like that or even your arms. As you come to a halt your arms go forward a bit and then back on this is the idea of overlapping action eso for this instance you can see let's go back to my main example, I put a tail on my ball. Now you can see the tail does not move in perfect concert with the ball right? As it moves up, it's sort of in the stretch position. And then as it gets to the top, it begins to fall independently. It's in the stretch position here, and then the ball is already compressed, but the tail has not squashed yet, and then it sort of recoils. You can see right recoils Then. That's called overlapping action, where actions don't happen all at the same exact key frame. Their things trail behind things trail behind the main movement. And that's that's why I used a tale, because it's a really good example. It follows the main body movement, but it is not in perfect concert with it, so really quickly. Let's show you how to do that. I'm gonna just grab my pen tool up here and to make this simple, it's just you shapes because I don't want to get too bogged in the software. I really want to show you the principles. I'm gonna make a no lips here, a circle, and I'll just make it to shapes. Here there is one, and I'm gonna grab the pen behind Tool or the anchor point tool. The hockey is why? And I'm going to grab this and move the pivot point to here because that's how we want a tale to move right. And I'm going to select this and duplicate it. Control D and I'm gonna hit V for my move. To what? I'm gonna move this over here to be the second link of my tail, so to speak. And I'll just hit enter to call this tale one and ah, entail, too. Now, if you're not familiar with aftereffects parenting and how it works Ah, if you parent one thing to another, it will be attached to that thing, so to speak. So let's grab this tale one in this little parent link here, I'm gonna select this and parent this to the ball and tail to should be parented to tail one. So now if I take the rotation tool and I rotate tale one, it will rotate tail too. But they can also start to move independently and same thing with the ball as they move it to the tail sort of moves. And we've got this very basic sort of rigged going on
5. Overlapping Action: Okay, So not to do the overlapping action part with a tail. We're going to get a little bit technical, so don't get scared. We're gonna do a little bit of expression stuff. If you're not really sure what we're doing, you can just copy and paste what I type in, and and you don't need to worry about it. But I will go through piece by piece and let you know what I'm doing. So I have my tail here, which is just two segments to ellipses, very simply drawn Tale one entail to. And I have the, uh, the tail to parented to tail one so that you can see if I rotate this with W the, uh the the second part of the tail sort of follows along right. And that is the goal to create this little chain. Now, if I do this with the main ball So if I take this tale one and parent it to the ball, which is what you might be inclined to dio what happens when you play the animation is not Your tail kind of stretches out, right? And if you slow it down, that's this is not really what we're looking for. Right year your shapes air getting all wonky. The tail would not stretch. The body is stretching, but we want we wanted to follow along rather than stretching. So there's a real simple way for around that. First of all, I must undo this parenting. So we've got our tail detached. What we want to do is create a no object. So right, click hit new. No. Ah, and what this is is a non rendering objects. So if I hit play, it will not render it disappears. But it is useful for rigging, for setting things up and holding information on. We're just gonna call this, uh, tail group to go now. What we want to do is the parent. This tale group is null to the ball, so let's grab the parents to the bowl. So now you can see it's squashing and stretching with it, and it's keeping its position. That anchor point is what we're looking at right here and let's go to Tale one, which is the base hit p to open up position. Now we want this tale to follow along with where this null object is, but we don't want it to squash and stretch with it. So what we're gonna do is put an expression on this position to calculate where the position should be. So let's hit Alz Ah, on the stopwatch click. And what we're gonna do is again if you're if you don't know how to code, that's totally fine. I'm gonna do it really simply, and you can just just do what I dio and we'll just call this, um um let's go X. That'll just be are variable where we're creating X equals and we want this to equal tail group. So let's grab the Pickwick and grab that. Who have X equals this sort of gibberish that they put in there for You, uh, entered to a new line and what we want to tell the position to be is ah, ex dot t o capital w o r l d two world open parentheses, uh, ex dot anchor point with the capital P on point and just click away there. So know what this is doing is first we set up X x is this layer Ah, and now you're taking X and telling it basically to look at rather than looking at the relative coordinates of this object, we're telling it, Look at the world cord. Let's look at the entire composition and find exactly where that point is and set it to that eso If that's if that's confusing to you, don't worry about it. You can just copy and paste what I did. But now you can see detail doesn't squash and stretch of their ball. It just follows along, which is exactly what we want. Okay, so now that we have that down, we can we can make all this stuff disappear. Don't worry about the crazy math. I know we're all panicking. It's OK. Hit our on the tail one and two because that's what we're gonna be key framing here, and we'll just keep framed the rotation. And you might want oh, click the ball and hit you just so he can see where are other key frames are eso zoom in a bit with plus and minus. Okay. So as the anticipation goes and see the, uh, tail should rotate and grab, I rotate tool with W that should rotate to sort of stay on the ground, something like that. So it's sort of and then as it pushes off, right, the tail is going to be extended. Something like that. As it continues to fly through the air, it's going to be probably completely extended right here, right? Says something like that from the launch point. Once it gets to the top, it's going to actually see Let's undo that. Once it starts to go back down, it's going to level back out again. Maybe it should be closer to the impact analysis money, maybe closer to their impact. Have it slammed down. Remember to animate these individually as well, because we want we're gonna overlap in overlap the individual segments of the tail as well . So let's see hits and then the recall The slight second bounce and then it settles back. I'm just gonna copy this key frame and happy this key frame because, you know, they're the same. Okay? And I'm just gonna match the easing as well on these. Just matched the same from the the ball bounces F nine and those ah f nine on these last few as well. Let's see what we got. Okay, that's okay. But see, the problem with this is it's all moving again in concert with the ball when the reality the tail would be dragging just a little bit behind. So a really, really quick and easy way to at least get started on this is to take the key frames and just just move them back one key frame at a time. So they are one frame at a time, so it's select rotation on tail one will slide this over one rotation on tail to will slide this over to and now we're getting somewhere. See how the tail drags behind. Just a little bit of these opening Keefe aims were probably fine. So I'm gonna move these ones back because I had to his position really well and maybe I wanted to extend a little bit sooner. So let's take these extension key frames to move them a little bit closer. And then it goes back, uh, hits and then slams. Maybe I want this top tail key friend Toe Beach trailing behind a little bit more. You could do a little bit of spot changes here like this. You don't want to get too crazy because you really want the key frames to do the work. You want to be set up properly rather than having all these individual hand drawn animation . So I would see right here. This should probably impact a little bit more so key for him that down and make sure that just nothing's intersecting the ground. Sometimes that can happen. When you do that quick and easy way of overlapping, and then you go, there's some overlapping action. You can do this with all kinds of things. Like I said, clothing, earrings, jewelry, any kind of thing. That, ah, that would continue its movement beyond your natural movement. And in the larger sense, when you're using a character, this is true of arms and legs, hair clothing of that sort self. This is a great way to get some really cool, realistic animation added on to your boss. All right, Next up, we're gonna talk about arcs
6. Arcs: Okay. The next principle of animation we're gonna talk about is called Arks Now, Very simply put, I mean, you know what anarchist's rather than something that is linear. It's something that moves in an arc in motion arcs, arm or organic arcs look more convincing. They look more appealing. And here's a little example from our from our original little ball illustration. Here, you can see the ball on the top is moving in a linear fashion. Spatially speaking, it's moving just from point A to point B, and you could see the ball in the bottom. I've added a nice little arc and you can see hopefully how much, first of all, how much more organic that is, how much more natural it feels, but also how much more appealing it is because this is, uh, this is how things typically are in nature. And this is why we find arcs more appealing visually, because this is how things work in nature. This is how our body parts move us. We swing our arms, they move in arcs is we turn our head. It's very unnatural for things to move in a perfectly linear fashion. Unfortunately, aftereffects by default makes everything will move in the linear fashion. So we need to sort of force it to do the opposite. Um, this is why things when you things look robotic when they're moving linear linearly? Because typically, robots move in a linear fashion because that's how they're programmed. That's that. What we see in sci fi movies, etcetera. So that's an easy way. Teoh Incidentally, animated robot, if you're interested in that kind of thing, Um, but there's a very simple way to do that. But what we want to do, rather than making this ball, goes straight up and down as you want this to move from left to rights. So what we're gonna do is go back to the main position and let's just take this. Click the position word, and that will highlight all the key frames. And we're just gonna grab the X value here and scoot that over just to give us some space. We're going to start the ball over here on the left and right here is where it takes off right before moving forward. We want this to land. We want the landing point to be over on the right, so I select all these landing point key frames and slide those over to the right. And now this sort of midpoint key frame. We really need this to be somewhere here in the middle, so I'm gonna grab that, move it over as well. Also, we've got in moving left to right, but we don't have an arc yet, and that's kind of problematic. Eso by default. It made this key frame linear because I thought it was it was going straight up and down. Um, but what we want to do is make this nice and curved. So let's right click on this position key frame. Go to key frame interpellation, and we're gonna set this spatial interpolation from linear to busier. Now, this is what we just change in the preferences. So by default, when you create a key frame, it'll create it, Lenny early so that you see, it's just basically a triangle. Let's move straight here straight back. But that's not how things typically behave. So we're gonna set this to busier hit, okay? And because he already gave me a slight little arc there so already better, however, we can do better. Let's, uh v you can see when you switch it Too busy. You get these little handles now, and these handles, if you grab them, will let you control the shape of your arc of your motion. So you want to stress she's out, make them nice and wide cool. Now there's a little bit of a problem here, and that is that the ball kind of hovers up in the air, which is fine, but it also hovers left to right as well, Like it's slowing down in mid air, which I hope I don't need to tell you is not how things behave in reality. So what we can do is a little trick called separating dimensions. If we right click on the position key frame at the position, word and separate dimensions that will take that will give us a Y position and an exposition. Okay, so now that we've separated dimensions, you can see that we have two different values. Now we've got our X and we better. Why so azi scrub through? We can see there's still something funky going on where it's slow here in the middle, and that's because we haven't eased key frame here on the X position. We don't really want it to ease and actually wanted to continually move in a linear fashion . So we can actually just delete that key frame there. And we want the why to still be easy. So I'm just gonna select that and just hit ease again, just to make sure. And now we may need to actually increase that easing a bit, so that has a better arc there. Let's go back to the graph editor And let's, uh, picture on, uh, value. And I'm just going to ease holding shift to keep keep it snapped. And you can see the ark is changing as we change it down here in the graph is Well, so now we have this nice little arc here. Okay? So hopefully you can see how, uh, just a simple arc adds a lot to our our animation that looks a lot more natural, more organic and war appealing. And just if you're if you're moving things through space, make sure that you're adding arcs where appropriate sort of as how easing our key frames sort of temporally temporally made things more interesting and more natural. This is sort of the easing, but for the spatial positioning of the key frame. So this makes things a lot more interesting. Try to add in arks wherever you can. Next, we will be looking at secondary action.
7. Secondary Action: Okay. The next principal's principle of animation we're gonna talk about is called Secondary action Secondary actions. Kind of a tricky one because it encompasses a lot of different ideas. Secondary action is any action that is subservient or not part of the primary motion. So if the primary motion of this piece is the bouncing of the ball that does not, the secondary action does not include the tail. The tail is considered part of that primary action. The trailing of the tail is the overlapping action, as we just talked about. But the secondary action might be something like the, uh, the facial expression that a character makes. Maybe if things ball had some eyes and does like a scared blink or something, maybe as its anticipating it does a little wiggle toe to prepare or as it's flying through the air. Maybe the tail flaps back and forth to indicate excitement or a wave or something like that . Or let's go back to my main example, I added these little bursts here is as the ball's leaping off the ground. You can see these little bursts are occurring at the takeoff and the landing, so that would be an example of secondary animation. It's it's it's sort of a slave to the main animation. It adds a little bit of interest, but it's not taking over the main piece. So, just by way of example, will do something real quick when I spend a ton of time on this, because the idea of secondary, um animation is so complex policy as the ball's rotating down let's do a little wiggle and are for rotate a key frame you to bring back all my key frames here as he's rotating as he squashing down, I'm just gonna make him. We go back and forth just a little bit now. I could probably probably stretch that out more so it looks like he's really digging in and , I don't know, shaken like he's his muscles or 10 stories getting ready. But you can see how that adds just a good amount of just visual interest, and I probably exaggerated a bit much, but I'm trying to make sure you can see what's going on here. Same thing for the tail. Let's take this second piece of this tale and, ah, say it's goes up. Maybe it begins to sort of flap back and forth. Every couple key frames is if it's wagging two key frames. Nothing too much. Second, our animation should always be subtle. That's probably a bit much, but trying to trying to get you guys to see sort of what this can encompass. So something subtle like that. I've made it look too much like a fish tale, but you start to get the idea. You could do a little bursts you can do, give him a face and make him blink things like that. That is the idea of secondary animation. Next, we will be talking about timing and exaggeration. The last few segments of this, this course, are going to be more geared towards some philosophical ideas of animation who entered some real technical stuff thus far. But we're gonna cover some more philosophical principles as we go forward.
8. Timing & Exaggeration: now the next couple principles we're gonna talk about. I've grouped together as timing an exaggeration, Typically these air, two different principles. But I feel like they can really go together philosophically speaking. So timing is just the idea of how long something should take and what effect that has on the feel of your animation. Eso, for instance, this is rather quick, but if we took this whole thing and I don't expect you to follow along technically speaking with this, but I just want to show you a demonstration. Uh, if we took the whole thing and stretched it out so that it was twice as long, hopefully you can see how much that changes the field. The animation of what does it feel like? All he did was extend all the key frames out. But it feels yes, a lot slower, but it feels a lot heavier, right? It feels like this ball, you know, maybe it wasn't squashing and stretching so much. Maybe more like a bowling ball weight rather than before. It was this peppy little bouncy ball. All I did was extend the key frames to make it slower. But you can see that change in timing changes, everything about the feel of this project. So one of the things I noticed a lot as on teaching animation to new animators is that they tend to take way longer to do things than they think they should. So, for instance, people will be animating a blink. I'll be really quickly pretend this isn't eyeball. It'll be animating a blink like that, and this is sort of the impulse that people have when they're animating blinks. In reality, an average blink, unless you're, you know, under the influence of something. Blinks should take two frames, three frames, four frames topsy. That's even, too. That's even to slope you can do in one frame. This is how blinks work in reality, but people tend to go a lot slower than than they think they should. So, for instance, if we did this, if I did this slow blink, what is a speed? What is a blink of that speed? Say to you that says that the characters may be tired. Maybe not all with it? Maybe. Ah, that lazy something like that. Whereas a quick blinker, a quick succession of blinks might tell you that there and no hyperactive or they're they're wary. They're worried or confused. Let's take a look at that. So these are just things to keep in mind as far as timing. First, firstly, checked to make sure that your animation is not taking longer than it should always try to tighten things up. Very rarely have to tell students to slow things down. It's almost always, I'm saying, speeded up, speeded up, speeded up Art on animation are all about contrast, right? Actually, any time you're trying to create interest in any way with public speaking or visual arts, performing arts, or anytime you're trying to be interesting or capture attention, what captures attention is contrast. So you have very slow elements. Contrast ID with very fast elements. Dark elements conscious with light opposite colors. Contrast ing very loud. Sounds very quiet Sounds. This is what we're talking about with contrast. So same thing here. The the anticipation is a little bit slow. The burst off the ground is very quick. It holds in the air nice and long, and then it snaps back again to the ground. So even within this short second and 1/2 animation, you're getting a good amount of contrast in the timing. So try to create contrast, tried to make things not take too long. Think about what the timing of your piece, uh, says about the content of the peace and how heavy is your object. Based on the the speed of it, you can see this feels very light. And maybe as an experiment as you're working, you know, maybe select all your key frames, hold down Alz and then drag. And just to stretch the mall out like that, not for a permanent sick, just to sort of give yourself a feel for Okay, what would happen if I slowed man and a animation down? Or how far can I speed it up before it feels it gets too fast? So these air things to think about secondarily and, uh, exaggeration is the next bit I want to talk about. So exaggeration is just that principle of like I covered a bit already pushing things to their limit to see how how exaggerated can we get before it just seems too crazy. So, for instance, if I make this extremely snappy here, the top, and make this, let's see what helps how squash. Can I make this ball before it feels too crazy, you know? How stretched can I make this ball feel before it feels to snappy? You see how I exaggerated that squash not feels really, really bouncy. It feels like it's snapping off around, snapping into the ground just by exaggerating that squash in that stretch. Now I think this is probably too much, but, you know, for your project, maybe it's not. Maybe you're going for something really crazy cartoony on. And this is This is sort of where the artistic element comes in. How, what's style of your animation? Are we going to really Warner Brothers? Crazy sort of slapstick crazy animation? Or is it more subtle? A little bit more realistic? In which case, maybe you don't exaggerate the the squash quite that much. But I always encouraged my students to push further than you think it needs to go and then back it off of it, rather than being too conservative and making it boring. So go with exaggeration of motion, exaggeration of the squash and stretch. Push everything to be a little bit more crazy than you think it should be, and you might come up with something cool and you can always back it off after the fact. But exaggeration. Great way Teoh. Illustrate some really cool character. Next, we're gonna be talking about animation, workflow and straight ahead and pose to pose.
9. Straight Ahead & Pose to Pose: So the next principle of animation is called straight ahead or pose to pose. Now this is in reference to methods of workflow for animation. So back in the day when Disney animators were animating, you know, you literally drew out every frame, right? You drew out every single image on and they figured out sort of a workflow where they would have a main animator, for instance, like Glen Keane was the guy that animated the beast in Beauty and the Beast. Now Glen Keane didn't go through and draw every single frame. He drew the main frame, the main poses, the pose to pose segment. And then they had some. Some newer animators or junior animators fill in the gaps in between Glen Keane's drawings on. So this is the idea of straight ahead vs Post oppose straight ahead. Animation as a workflow would be the idea of moving frame by frame. Ah, bit by bit until you finish your animation posed opposes, sort of how we've been working where remember I said, we have our are starting pose. Here we have our anticipation pose. We have our push off pose. We have our, um, peak of the jump pose, so to speak are extension. Posed about the land are compression pose here and then our recoil pose. So we still work. You can even see the arrangement of my key frames are very much in keeping with that. So I would highly recommend working this way. Um, now I think working sort of. I mean, aftereffects already fills in those gaps for you right now. So we don't have to go frame by frame and fill in all these these empty gaps cause aftereffects does that for us. But still, I think you should have the mindset of thinking imposes of your animation rather than just trying to force your ball to do to do what you wanted to do. So if it's like I want, I want the ball to be kind of here. And then when it's here, have it be there. And here it's like, now you're you're not thinking imposed, opposed. You're thinking in terms of individual key frames and now you're gonna get not only this wonky curve, but you're gonna get all these unnecessary key frames that are muddying up your timeline. You need to do mawr animation with less key frames that the less the key frames, you can get away with the better because it looks cleaner. It's easier to work with and easier to edit going forward and the way to solve that problem again. I see it a lot with animation students. The way to solve that is to think in terms of poses you're working posed to pose as you animate. So go through each pose of your animation, even if it's not a character. What are the beats of this scene, Even if its text store just a graphic or something, I think about what positions doesn't need to take in the scene rather than trying to force it frame by frame, uh, into into different positions. Okay, For the final section, we're gonna be talking about solid drawing, staging and appeal Justice, um, general design principles
10. Solid Drawing & Appeal: Okay. So in our final segment, talking about actual principles, principles of animation, we're gonna be talking about three of them. That is solid drawing, staging and appeal. Now, these this isn't the typical order. Again, I said I went a little bit out of the traditional order, But a group these together because these are all generals designed principles that extend beyond this animation. So the idea of solid drawing is really the idea of Does your object have weight? Does it have weights? Um, physically speaking, does it have weight in the scene? Doesn't feel like it belongs there. So you see this ball, you have to ask yourself, Does it feel like it's actually sitting on that ground? Does it feel like it belongs there now? If my ground was if my ground was here, I'd say we've got a problem with solid drawing, right? It doesn't feel grounded. So you've got to ask yourself, Does do your objects fit in the scene? That's the idea of solid drawing. Think of if you want to be really good examples of this, think of go look at comic books because they have to get the sense of motion with a single frame, right, and that is a huge accomplishment. Eso solid drawing The idea that your object fits in the scene and has weight on belongs there. Next is staging how staging is just maybe a compositional, um, word that is meant to say, um is your character or whatever you're animating, is it the main element of the scene? Is it getting distracted by other elements? So, for instance, in my little example, here I have clouds in the background of a little sunset. I've got these little elements of dirt and stuff on the ground, even, but none of it's distracting from my main focus, so you can have other little elements of appeal. I even have the clouds moving. A even have the camera moving across in this scene, but nothing has been taken away from the staging of this ball. This ball is still the main focus on. I accomplished that through shape through size and the scene through the contrast you can see the ball is dark against a light background. That's the way to do it. The most exaggerated motion most interesting motion is coming from the ball. Any other motion is subtle. You can see the clouds are moving. Suddenly they don't draw your eye. They just add a little bit to the feeling of the scene. And that's what we mean by staging and finally just appeal. Obviously, you probably are all bored to death ofhis that working in this sort of gray seen. So this is the stage, really, to start making this a little more interesting. So may changing some of the color up. This is completely up to you, but I'm just picking things sort of as we go. Maybe our Balkan finally be a different color, and you could do this at any stage of the of the process again, my backgrounds, blues, and maybe you want a nice contrast in color like this orange and appeal is just that idea of. Does it all fit together? Does it do the colors work? Do the does the scene work, and that's really what I tried to accomplish in this main seen, you can add as much as you want to your scene to make it visually interesting. I know it's been a little bit it's been a little bit dulled. Working with these strange cut these sort of boring colors and just the sort of gray scale thing. But the reason I did that is because I really want you to think about the principles first . Think and think about the sort of design secondary or the design could be, You know, um, not an afterthought, but that that can be something that is evaluated separately, right? The main thing in this course is to figure out what good animation looks like. That is really the goal of this. So you can go ahead and add, You know, a little I'm just doing this raid quickly, but little clown will make that weight duplicate that. I know. I'm very quickly. I'm not actually talking about my process here, but at some motion on that, maybe we add some grass to this cover story. Mario Vibe? I don't know. Maybe that background has a little ingredient on it. That'll that'll look a little bit nicer. Here we go. That's starting to look good. A little specks of dirt like I did before. You can see we're really getting appeal. This is the idea of appeal. Is the whole scene appealing? Does the whole thing work together? Ah, you know, Are your design principles intact? Are the color choices appropriate? Everything working together, that's all. The idea of appeal. And maybe we need, like, a little sun up here. Oh, not a hexagonal son, but maybe a circular one. Cool. Now let's take all those elements that we just made and you could spend as much time as you need on this. I have no intent that you, um, move as quickly services. I just did. Um Okay, So I selected all my elements that were not the ball, not that not parts of the ball. And, ah, CNN a color. All those hit the little colors, watch. You can change this toe like orange. So I know they all belong together, and I'm going to create a new null object. And I'm just gonna call this tan, and this is going to be like my camera, so to speak. So I'm gonna grab select label group. I'm gonna select all these orange pieces and I'm gonna parent those to the pan. Now, the cool thing about that is we can take this whole thing and that will be our cameras. So to speak is not a real camera, but it'll do the trick. P to open up position. Key frame that move forward and just have the camera pan over. Hustlers extended with viewing window. Here a bit. I have the camera pan over a bit. Mm, My grass. I didn't draw enough grass. Where is my grass? This is why you name things. People extend out of it. So now we've got sort of the whole scene moving across. Well, you know what? The ball should probably be parented as well to my pan. Here we go, my cloud. So they're moving as well. Now we've got this whole scene sort of working together again. I know. I moved quickly through the appeal phase, and that is because you could you could spend hours and hours and hours on appeal, adding little things here and there. You could have a bird fluttering by. You could have all kinds of things. This all adds to the feeling of staging and appeal. Is theirs what we're going for? All right, one more video will wrap it up and we'll see what you guys did
11. 11 closure: So one little thing I forgot to do is take this ball and sort of rotated into the balance. I think this is part of the appeal to and partner realism as its crouching down. I want it to aim. Let's see a in the rotation in the direction this lately that it's about to launch so that when it goes up, it gets to the top. We're gonna rotate it back. So it's level. And then as it goes back down and it's landing, I'm gonna rotate it out of the jump like that. And then as it hits, rotated back and maybe keep frame out there. Maybe it goes past a little bit and we'll just overlap it a bit. You know, that just creates a nice little effective and leaning into the jump and then propelling himself, etc. You may be an exaggerated a little bit more. Maybe there's a little bit more overlapping. It's back a little bit. That's the idea of overlapping action. You line up the action with you, line up the secondary overlapping action with the main action, and then you just offset it just by a frame or two like like I just did here, and that creates that nice little recoil bounce that we're going for really snappy. But it adds a lot of character. All right, now there's one more thing we need to do to wrap this all up, and that is export your final video so that you can share it on Facebook or Instagram or wherever you like. We don't want to have toe come back into after effects every time we want to watch our video. So there's a really easy way to export then and after aftereffects makes that pretty easy. So basically what you want to do, uh, is coming here. Make sure that your timeline is exactly how you want it. Because wherever this little timeline indicator is, that is where your project is going to render. So if you having a really short project output, you might want to consider that your your work space is just a little bit too small. So make sure you give yourself a little bit of space that after it lands, there's just a little bit of extra time for it to to resolve the whole scene. There on when you're ready to go, just go up to file export and add to adobe media encoder que Now you should have Adobe media encoder. It's a separate piece of software that that comes in the adobe package. See, if you hit that, it might take a little while, but it will open up a w media encoder. And ah, now there used to be a way to do this within after effects, and in fact, it's still in here on it's called the Render Queue. So you can try that if you get a window. Uh, and where is it? Down here? Render queue and it will open up this new window and you can actually do the same thing. But export it. Add to the render queue right here. Now it's a little bit outdated and it doesn't have quite the options that media encoder it does. But just keep in mind if the media encoder is not working for you or you don't have it installed, this is an option for you. However, once you add it to the media encoder que it should open up the queue through here, and this window should pop up. Now you should see probably a blank screen that You can see I'm exporting some other videos right now, but it will add something to your list here. It should add it down to the bottom. And you have a couple things you're looking at here. And if you look down here at the bottom left of where your project file came in, you should see a drop down menu. Now, this has a bunch of different Kodak's and video formats that you can use to output your video I would recommend. I mean, you can play with all these. I would recommend going with h 0.264 This is a pretty common Kodak that has a lot of options as faras the quality that you want to export, and you can get a pretty small file while still maintaining a pretty good quality. And that's really what we're going for. We're not going for this Superheroes for K film quality. We want something that's terrible, easy to use and still looks pretty good. So choose that it might be there by default already, and it'll probably say match source, high bit rate. That's a good way to go. It'll give you a really good balance of good quality and oh, and and small file size. So that is what I would recommend. But if you click this, you'll see all sorts of options on if you scroll down. It will even give you very specific options for whatever platform you want. Adobe has done a really good job of of working with these popular platforms to get good quality video video Codex for those platforms. We have YouTube down here, the bottom video, Twitter mobile device, Facebook, all different kinds of stuff to take a look here, pick whatever you like. I would just go high bit rate if you're just viewing this on a computer match source. High bit rate that will give you, um, the best quality were a 10 80 p, which is 1920 by 10 80. And if you click over here, this is just where you choose where you want to actually put the project and so you can choose your output area there. And whenever you're ready, go ahead and hit the uh, play button on the top, right, and that will begin your income and you can see it's continuing me encoding that I had earlier now one more thing I wanted to do before I leave you guys is to to show you that I'm not making this up. I wanted to go through just a little piece of a scene of a Disney movie that I'm sure you all know just to show you that these principles have been intact for the better part of 60 or 70 years. And they're continuing to go today. So this is a scene from Aladdin, and I just want to just run through really briefly. I'm gonna frame by frame and quick time so you can really see what the animators were doing . And it might surprise you going frame by frame exactly what they did. So let's see this. A chase scene from Aladdin and see up who is running up the stairs here. And I want you to focus as Aladdin comes in. Well, first of all, look at this stretch on ability, squashed, squashed in this lower position here. Right? And then immediately one frame. There's your stretch frame that we talked about right now is your squash and stretch. He pops in the air. He has a little hover in the air, just like we did with our ball and then he's eased. He's eased and then he's very quickly going to ease out here. And here comes a loud and very quickly. And as he lands, he's gonna easies easy. There's a squash pose and look at this stretch post coming up. Look at this now, when the movie's going full speed, you don't recognize this right, because it's going so quickly. Here, I'll show you see, it looks. It looks perfect in 24 frames per second, but when you slow it down, you can really see what they're getting away with. Here again, we're moving through. He's got a really nice arc ears. He sweeps down to grab. There's your arcs, some secondary motion as he's talking as his eyes or blinking as he's emoting. Facially, he eases into this pose. Kind of does a little shrug. This little overlapping action happens there on the rug that he's carrying, and here he goes for his anticipation. He winds up right. A lot of easing here is holding this post does a little secondary anticipation and look at this arc here is he swoops. You can see this ark. You can see the the rug and his body forming this perfect little arc here. As he slides out the window, we cut to the outdoor shot. He flies out the window. Bad guys jumped out after him, and you might notice that the bad guys air stationary while he's moving. That this is because although the animation has done a 24 frames per second, typically, uh, they are animated on what's called to you whenever he Whenever you hear someone say that was animated on twos, it means that they really only did a frame every other frame and every pair of frames is actually a copy of frames, but occasionally they will if they're showing particularly smooth motion. They wanna have a key frame on every single one of the 24 frames. So here you can see the bad guys are animated on twos. But Aladdin is animated on ones, which means every single frame is drawn out. And that's just a safe time because you don't want to necessarily draw 24 frames and for a single second when you can get away with just 12. So a little fun fact for you there. And just note the appeal of everything. The colors are working together. They have the Browns contrast it with the blues. This is a really common theme in Aladdin. I talked to the the the the visit of artist on this on this project Kathy Ulterior, and she was telling me about the different colors that they used. The constant blues contrast with Reds and these guys are going to collapse and and smash into crazy Hakim's discount fertilizer, and you can see a little bit of secondary action here on Hakeem. As he decides to go back to his work, he does a little shrug. His main motion is the scooping of the fertilizer, but he does a nice little shrug there, as he does it. So I just wanted Teoh you to really see that these principles are intact there, very much riel, and they still work today. So there you have it. There's your look at the 12 principles of animation. I hope you take these principles and apply them to the rest of your projects going forward because I promise you, if you do, they will really take your projects to the next level and make them stand out from the crowd. Now we know it seems a little bit strange that all we did was create this ball bounce. But I hope that you can see that just adding a little bit of these principles to a simple animation like a ball bounce gave this little ball a lot of character. And that's the idea. You can take something so simple and give it a lot of life. And as we saw in the Aladdin clip, these principles really do translate to the most complicated of projects. So it doesn't matter if you're bouncing a ball, are animating a full character by hand. What doesn't matter if it has 30 arms or if it's just a little sphere. These principles really will elevate your projects to keep them in mind. I promise your your work will stand out going forward. I would love to see what you guys have done. I would love to be available for you to answer any questions, whether technical or creative. Please show me your projects. Share them with friends and family. If you need any critique or any advice, please let me know and I love to help you out. Thank you for joining me and I'll see you next time
Justin Z, Making Animation Easy
