Learn Animation, The Beginner´s guide

Learn how the 12 Principles of Animation apply to your animation. With a very simple drawings, you will be able to understand what they all are and why are they important.

Squash and Stretch - see the difference it makes to an animated object weight and how it becomes more alive when adding squash and stretch.

Learn how the spacing between frames or how you Ease In and Out of the movement changes the expression of the animation.

How you time your objects effects their weight and gives a different impression of what material they are made of.

Learn how anticipating the movememnt adds more impact to it.

What is Follow Through and What is an Overlapping Action? In this lesson you will get some more clarification of that.

What is the difference between Exaggeration and Anticipation? How will exaggeration help your animation be better and more expressive?

Why does everything have to move in clear arcs. See the examples here.

What is Secondary Action and how is it different from Overlapping Action or Follow Through?

Learn how to use those two different ways of working with your animation.

Why is appeal one of the 12 Principles of Animation? What does it refer to?

What is Staging and how does it apply to animation?

This is a principle that refers to the 2D drawing part of the Animation. With 3D animation entering the scene, this is not a problem anymore.

Start by drawing a rough, round shaped characters to practice your animation.

Observe how the movement overlapp with the main action. This is very simple but great exercise.

Walkcycle is simple and difficult at the same time. In this lecture you can see that you can practice animating walkcycle with very rough drawings. I always encourage you to do that, so you don´t pay attention on the drawing but on the movement instead.

A short overview of the app we are going to be using here called Flippa Clip. You may use other apps such as Animation Creator Hd, which I used in the previous chapter, or any other you have in hand.

Start with roughly drawing the main shapes of the Elephant. Don´t draw facial features yet.

Add all additional attributes to the character after you make sure that the walkcycle works well.

Start polish your drawings.

Adding the eyes so they stay firm and solid on the Elephant´s face may seem easy, but the smaller the details the harder it is to keep them solid and on the right place. Here you will see how to do it.

Adding the pupils of the Elephant so that they don´t jump up and down on his eyes, but stay on place.

When you are happy with your walkcycle overall, it´s time to put some color

Adding some shadow on the Elephant will give it more depth and shape. But you need to follow some rules even when you add shadow.

Right now our Elephant is walking in one place, like on a treadmill. Learn how to add a background so it looks like he is moving forward.

Add color to the background without distroying the illusion that the Elephant is moving forward.

Get an understanding of what a runcycle is, frame by frame.

Draw the rough frames of the Bunny running.

Adding the ears when the runcycle is finished gives us the possibility to see how the body moves and add the overlapp of this action to the ears. This is a trail and error practice really. I´ve left my trail and error here to see how I correct the overlapping action to get a better movement.

Here you will learn how to make a character run towards us, using perspective changes of the arms and legs.

You add the tiniest details last and make sure they follow the main form and changes in perspective of the head, for example.

Learn how to prepare a scene. Why is it important to draw Thumbnails and how you can make a graph for your dialogue to hit the beats with the right poses.

After doing the thumbnails, now it is time to put these frames as Key frames in the animation app or program and time them to the dialogue.

You´ve done the preparation. Now it is time to polish your animation. Not all the frames you´ve drawn will keep their place or will be the same. Animation is about fixing what´s not working bit by bit until it looks great. Learn how to do that in this lecture.