Introduction to Animation

Demonstrates how weight influences character movement, balance, and anticipation, showing how heavier objects alter posture, weight distribution, and lifting technique through gesture planning and staging.

Explore animating a weighty lift with a blobfish-style character, using onion skin outlines, timing, anticipation, and squash and stretch to convey effort, balance, and motion.

Explore weight in animation by staging anticipation, grips, and poses before lifting. Vary frame timing to convey balance and effort as the character moves the object.

Break characters into basic shapes to keep proportions consistent across animators, then develop model sheets and turnarounds, using lines, curves, ellipses, and simple shapes for control.

Break a character into basic shapes to map anticipation, jump, and landing, while applying gravity, inertia, and absorption for lifelike motion and avoiding mechanical symmetry.

Breaks a character down into basic shapes and builds animation from the base up using layers, arcs, and shape combinations to maintain volume and simplify motion.

Learn how to create a boil to show line shakiness and lifelike motion during a push-up, using anticipation, frame timing, and easing to express strength and fatigue.

Block characters with color-coded lines, reference model sheets, and trace and stagger frames to create a boil that adds lively, subtle shake while keeping proportions.

Learn to craft a take or double take where a character sees something and reacts with anticipation. Use onion skinning and quick in-between poses to sell the motion.

Explore take demos with easing toward a final pose, create in-between frames, and layer facial features while managing versioned saves for consistent, expressive animation.

Master staggered frames to make objects or characters shake or vibrate while performing other actions, from a pulled wire to a laughing pose and a trembling door scene.

Adjust anchor points and use the Free Transform tool to stagger character frames, preserving head size, guiding arcs with curves, and refining in-betweens for smooth animation.

This lecture demonstrates staggered frame sequencing to create hand tremor and shake, using patterns like 1 3 2 4 3 5 4 6 for varied, dramatic motion.

Create staggered hand animations by duplicating and offsetting frames (1 1 2 2 3 3 4 4), exploring three methods: straight motion, pose change, and two-pose jumps.

Learn to craft a natural head turn using arcs, keyframes, and a breakdown with easing, achieving a subtle pendulum motion while preserving proportions and avoiding a robotic look.

Master head-turn animation by syncing eye movement with the head, adding subtle eyelids and brows, and using opacity and arcs to guide facial features.

Learn how to apply follow-through and overlapping action in a head-turn animation by timing secondary motions like floppy ears, jaw, and tongue as separate layers, with frame-by-frame adjustments.

Learn to animate a head turn by letting the shoulders or another part lead, using staggered timing and anticipation to avoid robotic movement and keep eyes in natural direction.

Learn to build a convincing walk cycle by starting with the contact pose, anchoring hips and legs, managing weight, the passing position, and timing, while keeping one foot planted.

Explore walk cycle fundamentals by syncing torso and head timing, using keyframes to shape poses, and vary frames to convey weight, speed, and character personality.

Coordinate arm and leg motion to create a walk cycle, turn it into a looping symbol, and use frames, keyframes, and parallax background to move the walk across the stage.

Learn to create run cycles that differ from walks, keeping feet off the ground for at least one frame, using contact, passing, and upper and lower poses.

Explore how to animate dialogue by aligning accents in the body, head, and hands with spoken lines, then fine-tune mouth shapes to match sounds.

Learn frame-by-frame animation techniques by building the body first, creating walk poses, adding in-betweens, and refining facial features and mouth shapes for believable dialogue.

Adjust lip shapes to match enunciation, blend fast speech, and check timing to avoid overactive mouth movement. Ensure eyes and pupils stay focused on the same subject.

Frame-by-frame dialogue animation hinges on matching mouth shapes and jaw movement, using squash and stretch on the head while building from a base skull and layering accessories separately.

Practice builds intuition from simple to complex projects, teaching the rules and when to break them while you discover your style across characters, objects, and art.