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"12 Principles", Best Practices, and Animation Lingo
"12 Principles", Best Practices, and Animation Lingo
Notice how many layers they are thinking through. Road. Cones. Cones flyin. Cityscape moving.
Motorcycles swervin. Guy moving to throw a bomb. Bomb! Tunnel background. Bomb exploding!
Guy moving thru 1) smoke 2) fire! Guy’s motorcycle sliding! Guy putting foot on ground, guy
catching himself! Guys’ hair. Oh and all the little ashy fire bits falling around him.
#6 Slow in and Slow out
● Nothing really goes from 0 to 100
● You gotta gain momentum to believably go anywhere
● If you are running you can’t just stop
○ Especially down a hill
● Think about the energy and effort it takes to literally do anything!
● The closer together your drawings, the slower they move
● The further apart your drawings, the faster they move
○ Always have a little bit of that last one: overlap
○ Animation without overlap and especially without slow in/out will ‘strobe’
○ Need those frames to overlap in order to let your eyes read it nice
● An abrupt change is no good unless it’s for effect/used sparingly
We did it. We made it to the sonic part of the powerpoint. If you close all your browser windows I understand
Even with this eyeball walk cycle - when the eyes step
forward and drag back, the drawings are really close
together. They speed up only when they are crossing
over to make their step,
#7: Arcs
● Everything moves with arcs! Nothing moves in a straight line!
○ Unless it is a very specific and terrible robot
○ Throw something across the room. It doesn’t fall straight down!
● Different weight or intentions are going to determine the arc at hand
● Think of tips of hands/feet, centers of heads/torsos, etc
○ Easiest way to start getting them into your practice is to
make a guide layer to show where you’ll be animating to and from.
● Utilize slow in and out inside of your arcs
○ Again: if you throw something,t will slow down when it is at the top of it’s arc
○ When an animal runs really fast and goes to turn, it MUST make an arc - it keeps it from
falling over. Your car can’t even turn perfectly without doing a lil arc action.
Arcs !!!!
#8: Secondary Action
● Similar to overlapping action, but think “Cause and Effect”
● Consider stacking your animation in order of importance
○ For example: a body movement will determine what extraneous clothing will do
○ Another example: if a main character is holding another one, the main character’s actions will
determine where all the animation ‘lands’ for the secondary, held character
● If _______, then _______
○ Planning this out in different steps will help make your stuff more understandable
● This can be as simple or as complicated as you’d like…!
If ____, Then _____
#9 Timing
● Accumulation of literally everything we have been talking about and how you
can spread it out on a timeline to make it make sense!!
● Timing’s what it’s all about!
● We are lucky to do this digitally - but a lot of animators still use timing
methods used in the paper days
○ Used to have to really get a grasp on how long it’d take to get your
animation to read correctly (you’d have to wait…!)
● TIPS FOR TIMING!
○ Hold all keys, or have a ton of overlap, for at least 6 frames
○ Playback your animation a lot;
○ Do your key poses/moments have ‘breathing room’?
Just like you don’t want a crowded composition in a
drawing, you don’t want a crowded composition across a timeline
A few examples of timing I really like
#10 Exaggeration
● What’s the point of even animating if you don’t exaggerate?
○ Just shoot live action footage if you don’t want to exaggerate!
○ You can push any expression to the limit
which can really just make or break a funny moment or ‘take’
● Animation is literally an exaggeration of life
○ Making believable movement that is compelling
○ Telling stories that you literally cannot tell with live action storytelling
● More animator lingo: “plus” - as in, push your drawing poses harder.
Exaggerate them more.
○ Pick your poison: exaggerate a TON off the bat, then tone down your expressions as you
tighten up your animation passes - OR - start off refrained, and crank up your expressions as
you continue to ‘plus’ your animation passes
#11 Solid Drawing
● A solid foundation in drawing will allow you to animate anything you want
○ A wonky foundation in drawing will have you running into walls if you are trying to “classically
animate” and make believable things moving through an imaginary space
● Consider doing loose underdrawings on your rough animation passes. Lines
to make where eyes/faces go, a middle line thru a torso, etc
● Consider weight, center of gravity
○ your character should never feel like it would fall over
○ All movements should feel intentional
● SOLID DRAWING TIPS!
○ Make sure your feet (or anything else solid, placed on a surface) never slide around
○ Do sketches of different angles of your characters before jumping into animating them
○ Literally, keep practicing drawing, especially from life
The biggest obstacle to animating well is making your flat drawings feel like they are alive in a flat space. By practicing manipulating shapes in
perspective, you can get away with a ton of great animation, EVEN IF you struggle at drawing people.
That being said: get better at drawing people!! The shapes and structure is readable and recognizable to our also human brains. The better you
understand how it all works…. The better you can replicate it, and create work that is compelling to literally other humans
#12 Appeal
● This one is really pushing it…
○ Did the 9 Old Men just want to have an even number of principles??
● But seriously: it is how well you can mesh all 11 of the other
principles together to create “good” animation
○ Again, good is subjective
○ Literally appeal is …. Subjective!
● Starting out, your work is going to “lack appeal”
○ Your work will get more appealing over time, with practice
○ As with anything else in life…!
● DON’T STOP! Once you notice, literally, that your animation is
appealing to your own eye: it’s super rewarding
I can only describe appeal as, “I am glad someone made this thing that I have sat down with and watched.”
Maybe appeal isn’t so talked about in other art mediums because other art mediums don’t require you to sit down with someone
and all of their thoughts & drawings they have spent countless hours on (hey, again, not always but animation is notorious for that)!
Here is the first time I probably recognized it (I saw this as a CCAD Illustration Freshman, and because of this, I changed majors)
Once out of school, I started learning about things other than just the “12 Principles” … like how a fun
tree-chain version exists from the “Walt Disney of Japan”. And I started to meet and find out about a ton
of artists who didn’t stop animating after they started to figure it out
My taste for stuff has evolved since learning about animation and getting to know more people who are working inside of it!
This is a music video made by Benjy Brooke (one of our notable animators - he’s from Grandview, but lives in New York these days)
He made it with an awesome team of animators, including a ton of Gobelins students (who seem to be known for their drawing ability)
Animation Principles+
● Getting better at classical animation movement just really takes a combination
of practice and careful attention to detail that is happening in the physical
world around you
● While extremely hard to get to that high-high standard point, the journey to get
as good as you can is really fun
○ Ends up teaching you a lot about life and emotion
● Animation isn’t just about ‘the principles’, but it is a great place to start
○ Learn the rules before you break them
○ Don’t feel self-conscious as you work on sharpening your skills as an artist
● Animation “takes time” to make and also to enjoy
○ Cheers to getting better at making things that make people feel something!