How to Animate!!!

Animation is the art of tricking the audience into believing that a flat 2 dimensional image is alive. That's the goal, you succeed if you get there, regardless of the path you took. Now the guys at Disney back in the day, marked out a really great path to getting there, it's good to know it even if you find a different path later.

Anyway, the real secret to learning to animate is to animate - a lot. So stop reading and get to it! Right now!

If you insist on reading, here's what I recommend.
1. go read the Illusion of Life, it is THE BIBLE of animation (you can probably find it at a nearby library)
2. read Preston Blair's book (online here) it breaks things down pretty well.
3. read everything on Keith Lango's site.
4. if you aren't sick of reading yet, you could check out these 3 pages, (Zayats, Michael Comet, and Frank Silas) they're all explanations of the 12 principles but sometimes it makes more sense coming from a different voice.
5. enough already get to animating!

While you animate, here's some principles to keep in mind...

1.Appeal: Make it worth watching. Give your characters believable complex personalities. Design things so they are interesting to look at. Make it eye candy and emotionally drawing.

2.Secondary Animation: This goes with the emotional acting part of appeal. Secondary animation is the little actions that your characters do that aren't the main point. For example, if the point of the scene was for them to go from point A to B while saying "Blah Blah" then walking and talking is the primary animation, secondary animation would be kicking a can along as they walk, or swinging around a lamp post, or running up some stairs and jumping off. It's not needed but it adds some life to the character, giving us a clue to their personality and making them exist in their world.

3.Exaggeration: Animation is a caricature of real life. Pump it up to A) entertain, B) fight the computer's desire to average and mediocre everything out, and C) to make it feel real by distracting from the hundreds of subtle real life details you can't capture all of.

4.Squash and Stretch: Kind of under the umbrella of exageration, squash and stretch is one way to show the forces working on an object, and the material of an object. So when an object is traveling through the air it's forward momentum vs. the drag of the air, pulls it all long and skinny and streamlined. When it hits something the forward energy keeps going as much as it can and gets deflected out the side. With hard things (like skeletons) this shows up in arrangement, all folded up or all spread out long. With anything malleable the whole thing changes shape, but just like a water balloon, it might be long and skinny or short and fat, but there's always the same amount of water in it. Since we're animating and therefore exaggerating, don't be afraid to squash and stretch things that usually don't (like skulls, or cannon balls) to get the feeling you want.

5.Solid Drawing: Originally this principle was about making sure that your character looks the same in all 12 drawings per second. In CG the equivalent would be modeling and rigging well. But I choose to lump solid drawing in with the exaggeration idea. Never forget that the final product is going to be a 2D flat image on a screen. So the only view that matters is the camera's view. After you have made wild and fresh thumbnail sketches with a pencil, they often lose their energy when they are translated onto a 3D model. DON'T LET THAT HAPPEN! Make your line of action felt, get as close to the energy of your sketches as you can, if that means you have to pull the arm bone out of it's socket and drag it along who cares, as long as it looks right from the camera! Don't let the computer tell you what to do, your in charge.

6.Staging: Each frame is on screen for a fraction of a second, so your job is to present what's happening as quickly and easily as possible. Lighting, color, background elements, and movement are some tools you have to help direct the viewers attention to what is important. Paying attention to your character's silhouettes is a great tool to make sure that the character's actions are easily read. See the 2 guys ready to fight, the one with his limbs overlapping his body is less clearly posed. Remember, the only viewing angle that matters is the camera's.

7.Anticipation: Another way to make things more clear is to anticipate. When your character anticipates, they're showing the audience "I'm going to do THIS now" and then the audience is ready for it. And don't forget your physic's: "every action has an opposite reaction". If your going to lean forward you rock back to get some momentum, if your going to stand up you bend down to gather your muscle strength. Anticipation makes your characters flow more like real life.

8.Follow Through and Overlap: Follow through is the other end of anticipation. After you've told them what you're going to say, and then you say it, follow through is the part where you tell them what you said. When you swing a bat at a baseball you don't stop dead when you contact, the energy of the swing carries the bat all the way around. Follow through is the floppier bits (like hair or wrists) getting dragged along by the main part, and continuing on when the main part stops. Like a braid on a character who's running and suddenly stops, the braids going to whip forward and then back, following the original force until it's attachment to the main body stops it. Overlap is the fact that things don't all move at once, your hips move before your head, your ponytail moves after your head, if everything happens at exactly the same time it looks fake.

9. Arcs: Since we're talking about flow, we should talk about arcs. Your computer loves straight lines, point A to point B boom straight line. Organic life swings baby, point A swings through point C on the way to B. If you look at a skeleton it's all poles and pivot points. So a pole pivoting from one side will be describing an arc with it's other side. You must always fight the computer and make it give you organic motion instead of computerized motion, usually by setting extra keys

10.Timing: With timing you can show energy, weight, and mood. A head nodding up and down could be a yawn, a nod yes, or a sneeze depending on how fast it goes by. Unfortunately the only real way to get timing down is with lots of practice. One thing that can help is to carry a stop watch with you and time things you see in life, like how long does it take that person to take a stride. Here's a stopwatch for your computer.

11. Ease/Slow In and Out: This is an aspect of timing. Touch your nose. If you pay attention you'll notice that your hand started off a little slower, moved quick through space, and then slowed down again so you wouldn't poke yourself in the eye. That's slow out and slow in. The computer wants everything to be the same, average, and boring. Organic life moves at different speeds, things move fast when covering distance, and slow down to stop. You wouldn't pull into a parking space at 40mph and hit the break, you ease into it. Course there is fast in also, like throwing a punch, you want your fist to be at top speed at impact. So one easy way to work with ease is to set your 2 extremes (say hand on table and hand at nose) go to the middle frame and make it a keyframe, then drag that new transition key towards one of the extremes. This makes a slow from the further extreme and a fast into the closer one. If you look at your channels (f-curves in other programs) you'll see that ease in and out is actually just making arcs with time.

12.Pose to Pose vs Straight Ahead: There's always more than 1 way to do things. The end result you hope just looks like the characters were living and breathing and someone showed up with a camera, and whichever way you get to that point is fine. Straight ahead means you start in the beginning and just go, move something, go ahead a few frames, move it a little more. Pose to Pose means you build extreme poses on the timeline spread out where you think they will land, and then you go back later and make the transitions smooth between them. Keith Lango wrote the definitive pose to pose tutorial. Straight ahead can get a nice flow and you sometimes come up with creative ideas while going along, but it can also wander on and on and get the timing wrong. Pose to pose gives you strong poses (good staging) and you can make it fit the allotted time well, but if you don't polish it enough it's obvious how you built your animation and it looks dull. So try mixing and matchin, like pose to pose the hips and feet, and then straight ahead the torso and arms. And polish and polish. Remember it doesn't matter how you get there but you want your characters to breathe as if they were alive, instead of as if an animator moved them about.

Let's talk about
common Noobie mistakes.

1. Too Much Going On. Animation takes time, as your working you start getting more ideas, so you put them in to, Pretty soon your animation is wiggling and jerking all over and looks kinda crappy. Remember, keep things simple and clear. You have 1 main point/action you need to get across, focus on that. Once you have that you can consider putting some secondary animation in. Don't try and do everything at once, try and put 1 idea out at a time.

2. Twins. It feels like we do this all the time in life, raise both hands and gesture with them. Well it looks pretty dull in animation. Things happening symmetrically in the body, or happening at the same time, just doesn't look interesting. If you need both arms out, raise one higher, and have the other coming more towards the viewer. Check your silhouettes. Twins aren't always bad, but they are a very common Noob mistake, you might want to wait until you have more animation chops before using them.

3. Floaty animation. The curse of CG. This is a total noob alert thing. It shows that you aren't paying any attention to your timing, you are just setting extreme keys and letting the computer figure the rest out. Vary your timing, make it interesting, use ease, make use of anticipation and follow through so that your actual action can be 1 frame long and have impact. Put more keys in, the computer wants straight lines, you often want arcs, take the computer by the hand and lead it with keys around an arc. And learn how to control your channels (aka f-curves). The computer wants everything smooth and even, you don't, you want things to sometimes be smooth and sometimes have PUNCH! Don't let that gray box tell you what's up, represent!

4. Okay Channels. When you set a keyframe the computer marks the point in space, when you set another keyframe the computer marks the new point and figures out the inbetween stuff (in a boring straight line, not an arc). By default the computer kind of fudges through your points so everything is smooth. For example, set a key of the foot at 1, then set another at 10 without moving the foot, then at 15 set a frame with the foot lifted up. If you play it back instead of staying still between 1 and 10 like you would expect, the foot sinks below the floor. If you look at the channel's you can see that this is the computer trying to be clever and anticipate for you the lifting. Click->Drag->Select the frames at 1 and 10. Right Click inside that yellow bounding box. Choose interpolation. Interpolation means how the computer figures from 1 point to the next. Default and Slope mean the computer will make this floaty anticipation for you, Linear means it will make a straight line from 1 key to the next, Zero slope means even more anticipation, Hold means that it won't move at all until the next key (so frame 14 the foot would still be down, frame 15 it would pop up) All the interpolations have value, learn to use them.

6. Shoulders. Raise your arm over your head, your shoulder's at your ear ain't it. Put your hands on your chair arms, push yourself up, look where your shoulders are. Shoulders move a lot, but a lot of beginners never get around to moving them. Don't be one of them. (Skeletally speaking, you can't lift your arm above horizontal level without moving your shoulder)

7. Thumbnails. Don't just rush to the computer. Get out a pencil and scrap paper. Draw stick figures (or better) and work out what possible poses to use. Be bold, experiment, keep it fresh. Try out every idea you can think of, it's easier and less work to do it on paper, and your more free because your not fighting a rig. Remember, the first thing you think of, will also be the first thing everyone else thinks of, put some extra time in and come up with something more original. Once you've decided on some good poses try them out on your model. Can't get the arm to match your sketch, pull it out of the socket, that's why you did sketches, so you wouldn't let the computer dictate to you what can and can't be done.

8. Act it Out. Get up out of your chair. Move. Try it out yourself. Watch yourself in the mirror, Video yourself if you can. Notice what muscles you use, where your weight is, when your weight shifts, what happens to unused limbs. Take notes, make new thumbnails. Acting it out and using recorded reference makes your animation feel more authentic.

9. Contrasting frames. Strong contrast is easier to see and feel on the screen, even though you won't consciously see it. So having the long skinny stretched out ball, change to the squished flat ball on the next frame will feel more rubbery. Or having the back all curved over trying to lift a barbell, change over to totally arched in the next frame holding the barbell, will help sell the weight.

10. Weight. A tricky thing, but if you can show it you prove your not a newbie. Spine reversals show it well. Also timing, and squash and stretch. Think about where the weight is, where it's coming from, what's propelling it, what's catching it, and how gravity is always pulling on it. Think about inertia. Practice.

11. Balance. Think of the center of gravity as a big ol iron ball in the middle of your character, the ball is going to be in the middle between all the outstretched parts. Now there's a magnet under your character pulling the ball down to the ground. The character keeps the ball off the ground by keeping sticks (characters' legs) between the ball and the ground. If he sticks out a leg the ball finds the middle of all the sticky out bits, so he has to reposition over his remaining stick. If he bends over the ball rolls between his butt and head, so he has to change the angle to keep it over the sticks. Remember if the weight is over a leg, that leg can not move, it's nailed down.

so that's what I know so far.
I am still a self taught beginner, so I have to go get back to practicing ... Right Now! bye.

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