Animation Fundamentals ProjectIn the industry of animation, all animators use the 12 Principles of animation in their projects. The 12 animations are 12 Prompts all animators follow to improve their work.
Squash and stretch – This action gives the illusion of weight and volume to a character as it moves. Also squash and stretch is useful in animating dialogue and doing facial expressions.
Anticipation – This movement prepares the audience for a major action the character is about to perform, such as, starting to run, jump or change expression. A dancer does not just leap off the floor. A backwards motion occurs before the forward action is executed. The backward motion is the anticipation. A comic effect can be done by not using anticipation after a series of gags that used anticipation.
Staging – A pose or action should clearly communicate to the audience the attitude, mood, reaction or idea of the character as it relates to the story and continuity of the story line. The effective use of long, medium, or close up shots, as well as camera angles also helps in telling the story.
Straight ahead action and pose to pose – Straight ahead animation starts at the first drawing and works drawing to drawing to the end of a scene. You can lose size, volume, and proportions with this method, but it does have spontaneity and freshness. Fast, wild action scenes are done this way. Pose to Pose is more planned out and charted with key drawings done at intervals throughout the scene.
Follow through and overlapping action – When the main body of the character stops all other parts continue to catch up to the main mass of the character, such as arms, long hair, clothing, coat tails or a dress, floppy ears or a long tail (these follow the path of action). Nothing stops all at once.
Slow in and slow out – As action starts, we have more drawings near the starting pose, one or two in the middle, and more drawings near the next pose. Fewer drawings make the action faster and more drawings make the action slower. Slow-ins and slow-outs soften the action, making it more life-like.
Arc – All actions, with few exceptions (such as the animation of a mechanical device), follow an arc or slightly circular path.
Secondary action – This action adds to and enriches the main action and adds more dimension to the character animation, supplementing and/or re-enforcing the main action. Example: A character is angrily walking toward another character.
Timing – Expertise in timing comes best with experience and personal experimentation, using the trial and error method in refining technique.
Exaggeration – Exaggeration is not extreme distortion of a drawing or extremely broad, violent action all the time. Its like a caricature of facial features, expressions, poses, attitudes and actions
Solid Drawing – The basic principles of drawing form, weight, volume solidity and the illusion of three dimension apply to animation as it does to academic drawing.
Appeal – A live performer has charisma. An animated character has appeal. Appealing animation does not mean just being cute and cuddly. All characters have to have appeal whether they are heroic, villainous, comic or cute. Appeal, as you will use it, includes an easy to read design, clear drawing, and personality development that will capture and involve the audience’s interest.
FAS1. Be able to use industry standard animation packages.
I learnt how to animate in Maya, maya is a very simple easy – to – use program that gives the user many additional benefits and advantages to using their program package.
My project shows the principles of animation as my Objects get slower and faster and also increase and decrease in size while rotating.
Pendulum animation – we were tasked with animating a pendulum that was given to us.
Ball animation – In this task we had to animate a ball to move, squish and squeeze, bounce etc.
Lamp animation.
Johnny the Box
Close up – very near.
Medium shot – In a movie a medium shot, mid shot, or waist shot is a camera angle shot from a medium distance.
Niall Quinn 