Transcripts
1. Intro - What even IS this class?: Do you ever watch
animator or whatever, and you see stuff like
this and you think, wow, how did they animate that? I wish I knew how to do that. Oh my goodness, this looks so
complicated and difficult. Well, it turns out it's not quite as hard
as you might think. In fact, pretty much
any of these kinds of movements you see
are all based on the same fundamental
animation principles that any animator of
any skill level can do. Hi, I'm Alex Myers. I've been animating on Youtube
for about six years now. I have 3.5 million subscribers. And pretty much what I do is I talk about movies and TV shows, and I animate
what's happening in the cutaway jokes
I make about them. And just like anyone
who does animation, I started out not knowing
anything about anything. Okay, I just drew little
stick figure dudes, I had no idea what I was doing. I mean, look at this, what is this teaching myself animation? Over these years, I've picked up a few techniques and methods that I use a lot in my videos. And I've gotten a lot of questions over the
years about like, how did I learn to animate and how do I animate and
things like that. Now I've talked
about this a little bit here and there on
my Youtube channel, but this class is
where I'm going to go a lot more in depth about the techniques I use and how
I personally do animation. Now you might see stuff
like this and think that it looks like it would
take a long time to make and you would be right. But doing animation this
way, like trust me, you learn so much about how to make characters move
in interesting ways. And like you'll get a lot
better at drawing so fast. The animation I'm doing here or that you see
here, for example, can be done by anyone of any
skill level on any software. Would literally pencil on paper like whatever you can use. Anything you got MS
Paint. I don't care. Everything you're seeing
here is based on the very, very basic fundamental ideas
of squash and stretch. Anticipation, bounce, all
the things that you might think are just like simple
beginner stuff for babies TM. But the reason why you should
return to the fundamentals, even if you have
animation experience, is because a lot of animators
and artists that I know, they tend to skip ahead
a little too fast. And they get overwhelmed
when they have to animate something that
seems complicated. Because they didn't
take the time to cement the fundamentals
in their head early on. So by the end of this class, you will take everything
you've learned and make a sequence of a character
jumping in the air, doing a spin, landing,
stumbling to their feet. All you need to do
is really understand the basic building
blocks of animation. And anyone can animate
stuff like this. And I'm going to show
you how in this class, whether you've been animating
professionally for a while, you just want to like learn some different
methods of animation. Or you're a beginner who's just doing this for fun, whatever. I'm going to show you how I approach character animation and what techniques and methods
I use in my videos.
2. The true power of Squash and Stretch: I know that you know what
squash and stretch is. Okay? Things land on the ground. The squashed down for a second. You jump in there, they get all stretched out.
Animation one oh one. But as I said in the intro
lesson to this class, this really is the
building block for any kind of movement that you
could ever want to animate. Honestly, I personally am
more particular to like, you know, cartoony
smear type movement. But anything you see where
someone is running or jumping, or doing any kind of rigorous
movement, this all applies. You can see some examples
here that I'm showing you. And this is where our
animation is going to start. So first, draw out whatever your character is going to be. I would recommend starting with something simple
so you can focus more on the movement and less on like the details
of the character, hair and clothes and
stuff. I'm gonna use my little baby man here that
I use in all my videos. But draw your little
whatever in like a neutral pose, just
kind of standing here. Okay, now we're going to
start the squashing part. So we're going to make
our characters start to blink and squash
down a little bit. This is called anticipation, which is a really
important part of movement because it
gives the viewer a moment to anticipate that there is a movement
about to happen. Okay, hence the name. Right now, we could just
leave it like this and move on to the jumping part,
and that would be fine. But this is going to lead into our next lesson about
smears and smear frames, which is probably my
favorite thing to draw. So I'll see you with
the next lesson.
3. You'll never draw smears the same way again: Okay, so everyone knows smears
and smear frames, right? It's when you draw the
arm and it's all like, and then it looks like
it's going fast, right? And like sure, that's true. You know, that's very
basic smear frames, but that's not what
we're going to do here. Okay, smear frames at the most fundamental
level are when you completely disregard
the character model. Like physics realism, you throw all that
out the window and you draw the character
in a way that shows very exaggerated movement. This could be for the sake
of making it look fast. It could also just be
to show personality, emotion, or just 'cause
you think it's funny. Some people don't like using
off model smear frames, and those people are boring. So going back to what we
did in the last lesson, the basic movement our character is going to do is squash down and then jump in
the air. Okay, so after the blanket that
we drew last time, we're going to go
full smear squash. We're going to keep the same basic shape
of the character. You can kind of do whatever
you want, like this, since it's only going
to be on screen for like a couple frames really. You could just draw anything
as long as the shape still indicates that the
character is squashing down. Then for the stretch
upwards, it's the same idea. You keep the basic shape of the character
roughly the same, although you stretch it way out. Or you can just have as much
fun as you want, honestly. You can have like the
eyeballs be all giant, the mouth stretch all
the way up like this. You can have the arms doing some kind of whatever
the heck this is. It's up to you. Now, once you've drawn your
characters jump, we're going to have them spin
around using spin smears, which is probably my favorite
favorite thing to draw. Again, much like with
the squash or jump, we just did because
the character is spinning around really fast. We draw their features being stretched out in kind of like a parabola shape where the
apex is toward the camera. So as long as you keep the
same basic shape intact, you could have the eyeballs stretching out the
head like this. The tongue can wrap
around like this. The body itself
could just be like a little squiggly,
whatever this is. And have the arms or eyes or
feet or whatever like those can sort of show
the spinning motion in like a fake three D. Kind of, we're gonna draw two or three of them. It's
kind of up to you. And we're gonna end
with the character in a pose that looks
like they're about to fall with the arms kind of arched up this way, legs
up that way like this. You can practice some
foreshortening here if you want. Anyway, after you've done that, please join me in
the next lesson.
4. Memorize this pattern and you'll look like a pro: Okay, so looking back
at our sequence, we're going to have the
character start to fall with their arms and legs
going up slightly. And you can smear their
face like a little bit just to kind of show some
like movement is happening. Then we'll draw
another smear of them falling and squashing against
the ground like this. Now here is where I'm
going to introduce this technique that probably
has an official name, but I don't know what that is, so I just call it left upright, down, right forward,
because I'm very clever. This is something you can
see in a lot of anime. In particular, when a character is flustered or staggering, losing their balance, or
they're really upset, they're coming towards
the camera, whatever. And I think it's pretty self
explanatory, as you can see, applying that to our animation. When the character lands, they're going to squash down. And then as they come up, they're going to
lose their balance a little bit and then
catch themselves. Now, this isn't like a set
in stone rule because, you know, with
anything artistic, you can kind of do whatever
you want, honestly. But you can also use
this part to practice the concept of how when
people maintain balance, they sort of move their arms and legs in opposition
to each other. You know what I mean? Like when someone's
running, for example, the left arm goes up, when
the right leg goes up, and then they kind of switch
back and forth like that. So when our character catches their balance, we draw them with face facing down left. And then the left arm is down. The right arm is up, which means the left leg is up and
the right leg is down. And then for the
second pose, it's going to be kind
of the opposite, where the head is upper right
and the left arm is up. The right arm is down, right
leg down, left leg up. Now the last one here, when the head is
down right here, the character has
already kind of caught their balance
a little bit. So both arms are going to
kind of be up in sort of like the same anticipation blink pose that we did back
at the beginning. Both arms are up, both
legs are on the ground, but they're kind of
squashed down a little bit. And then finally,
you can draw like a new standing pose if you want or just re use the
first one you drew. You can also add a
little bounce like this. You just want to give a
little more personality. It's up to you. And there you
go. The sequence is done.
5. The simple secret for more organic animation: Okay, so now we've
drawn every frame that we need for the animation. But this is where another very important concept
comes into play, which is how long or how
many frames to be exact, should each of
these be on screen? So in general, I animate
on two at 24 frames, which means a total of 12 cells per second possible,
using old terminology. But if you play
all these back at an equal two frames per pose, it ends up looking
kind of robotic and not quite as
dynamic as it could. So what we're going
to do basically, is make it seem a bit
more choppy on purpose by holding some of these for like three or four or more frames, instead of just two,
you can add a lot of personality to how
the character is moving. So as a rule of
thumb for myself, I hold my blink frames
for three or four. Any movement smears are kept at two once the character
is in the air. This pose is held for
like maybe five or six, you know, depending on
how you want to look. Then the beginning of
the fall is three. As gravity starts to take over, falling smear is two,
hitting the ground is three. The first stumble is two, the second is three or four. Because you sort of like imagine them trying
to like they're like hanging in the
air for a second as they sort of
pick themselves up. And then 22 and the end. So as you can see, if
we played them all back next to each other by
holding these frames, which you would think would make it look like worse, right? It looks choppy. Animation is bad is what everyone thinks. But actually in my opinion, it makes it feel more how a person would kind of move. Like, I don't know, it
feels like more organic. I guess this is something that beginner animators do sometimes. I also used to do this a lot. They want to make something
look more impressive, but they end up making
it just kind of be like too fast and
too like robotic. But if you slow it down in a way that makes sense, like,
you know, for example, when someone lands
on the ground, they would be there
for a little bit longer than they would
for doing something else. So when they jump in the
air and then they hang for a little bit before they start to fall and gravity takes over, you know, like
things like that can make a really big difference. So play around with the frames, make it look kind of the way
that you want it to look. And then congrats, you're done.
6. Outro: And that pretty
much brings us to the end of the class,
just a quick review. Here we learned
about anticipation. Smearing your squashes
and stretches, spinning smears, holding frames. And how to make a
character look like they're stumbling and
catch their balance. Now, of course, as with literally
any artistic technique, you know, these
ideas can be used in a variety of situations. Like a character spinning
around when they get punched, or a character bouncing
around a room, or doing like a funny
run type thing. You know, whatever all
these techniques and principles apply to
literally anything, like I said back in
the intro lesson, I know these are very, very basic fundamental
ideas and techniques. But as hopefully you've seen, they really are the building
blocks of everything. Like I know I'm just
repeating myself here. But once you understand these elements and
these basic principles, if you really understand it, you can draw a character
doing anything in particular, like funny, cartoony kind
of motion like that. Stuff looks really
complicated like this. But once you understand
how it's done, like anyone can do it, so please keep practicing, redo the sequence
over and over again. Make some different changes,
experiment with it, different poses, different
numbers of frames. You know, try doing different kinds of smear frames, whatever. Maybe you'll find
something you like better. Or maybe you two will come
to realize that you just kind of want to draw spinning smear frames all day like me. But anyway, thank you for
participating in this class, and I hope you learn
something along the way. My Youtube channel is Alex
Myers, if you're interested. But above all else,
thank you for watching, and I hope you have a nice day.
Alex Meyers, just another jaded millenial
