This project was entirely impossible for me to create. Illustrator is a program that my brain literally cannot comprehend, no matter the amount of help I receive or tutorials I watch.

What are the 12 principles of animation?

Disney character animation from the 1920s through the 1970s—by two long-term animators and Disney Legends. Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston worked with Walt Disney and other leading figures across five decades of Disney films. They animated leading Disney characters and worked with others who helped perfect an extremely difficult and time-consuming art form. This illustrated volume is a “how-to animate” book crafted for anyone to enjoy.

Thomas and Johnston wrote The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation in 1981, with the book still holding fame to this day for the techniques laid out in there. Here are the 12 principles pf animation:

1. Squash and stretch
2. Anticipation
3. Staging
4. Straight ahead, action & pose to pose
5. Follow through and overlapping action
6. Slow in and out
7. Secondary action
8. Timing
9. Exaggeration
10. Solid drawing
11. In computer animation
12. Appeal

This video explains the 12 principles really well:

Here are my notes and tips to remember after watching this educational video:

1. Squash & stretch – object must have the same volume consistency
2. Staging – moving your eyes across the screen. Know when to be CU and FA. main action should be in center or in a ⅓ position. In looking at something, more lead space in front
3. Straight ahead / pose to pose
   • Straight ahead
     • Basically onion skin technique
     • Good for unpredictable things. Hard to animate pose to pose because the movements are random.
   • Pose to pose
     • Drawing main points and then going back in and filling gaps after
     • Gives an idea on what the final action is and how to get the character there
     • Physics of movement
   • Can animate using both
     • Physics of things (PTP) can be added after main movements are outlined (SA)
   • Vocabulary for pose to pose
     • Main poses: Keys
       • Made first, then perfect them
     • Secondary poses: extremes
       • Now decide how far the character will go within the frame using extremes
     • Further broken down movements: breakdowns
       • Now decide how keys and extremes will connect using breakdowns
       • Then you can in-betweening to make the movements smoother
4. Follow through and overlapping action / drag
   • Follow through – the way the character’s bodyparts continue to move after the body stopped
   • Overlapping action – the off-set between the main body and the parts
   • Drag – delaying the movement of body parts in relation to the main body
   • Basically, when the main body moves, the appendage should be the last thing to catch up. When the body stops, the tip should go past it.
5. Slow in & slow out – movement starts slowly, builds speed and ends slowly.
   • Take your two extreme poses, draw a single in-between, then in between those and then draw in between the drawings closest to the extremes.
   • Obviously added to the things that need it.
     • Not the bullet going out of the gun, but to the gun itself in recoil
   • Choppyness in animation is bc each drawing should be evenly spaced. Drawings should be far away in middle of action, but closer together at each end of the action.
6. Arcs – Most living creatures will move in a circular path (arc)
   • Smear. Beginning and end pose and then draw an arc in between with same color, slightly transparent
     • Fragments = the shape of the arc is not entirely filled in for more effect
7. Secondary action – gestures that support the main action to add more dimension to the character. Should not detract from main action, but can give the audience a sense of emotion that the character has.
   • Staging comes into play here. If the secondary action is swallowed by the primary, the audience won’t even realize it’s there.
8. Timing – personality and nature of an animation is greatly affected by the number of frames inserted between each main action
   • Many drawings close together = action is slow
   • Very few drawings far apart = fast action
   • 24fps in standard movies. If one drawing is made for each of the 24 frames it’s called “drawing on ones.” if one drawing is made for every 2 frames: drawing on twos, so on and so forth.
   • Drawing on twos makes it look smoother 
9. Exaggeration – every pose, action, expression can be taken to the next level to increase the amount of impact on the audience.
   • Doesn’t mean more distorted, just more convincing 
10. Solid drawing – Making sure the forms feel like they’re in a 3 dimensional space using volume, weight and balance.
    • Draw all things in 3D
    • When drawing a rough pass at the character, use shapes like cubes, spheres, cylinders to construct the character.
    • Draw perspective lines on the ground around character 
    • When finalizing character, be mindful of overlap of features and include whenever possible. Without overlap, everything seems to be on the same plane.
    • Avoid twinning: where each arm and leg is doing the same movement 
11. Appeal – characters should be interesting to look at
    • Dynamic design can boost appeal
      • Use a variety of shapes
    • Proportions – increase size of interesting features and shrink size of things that are ugly/boring
      • Finding the aspect of the character that defines their personality and blowing that up can create a more appealing design
    • Keep it simple: too much information can overcomplicate things. A lot of details = harder to animate bc you have to draw them hundreds of times.

Reading

Translating the story into a digestible format for your audience can be extremely difficult. How can you put so many thoughts you have for the story in without it getting too convoluted for the audience? Find the tools that strike you at your story’s core by staying true to the main message and tone.

Techniques and styles are important factors within trying to translate your story.

Techniques: hand drawn animations can be expressive and emotionally driven; stop motion – 2D or 3D = can maintain that handmade quality (especially if “found objects” are used; 2D CGI can range from flat and clean to highly textured and and robust; 3D gives an even more robust take on your story, giving the digital space a modeled world and characters that turn into puppets.

Styles: fluid transitions allow flow from one scene to the next, seemingly, without cuts; 2D/vector images come from Adobe Illustrator or Linux and can be used for graphics; handmade designs use real materials, have texture and invoke an innocent feeling; collage is a mixed medium that has a handmade feel and can be used title sequences or animated documentary; 3D can immerse the audience in the character’s world, using light and shadows.

Research to inform

• 0:09 – exaggeration with his jump scare
• 0:20 – drag (his tongue licking and then the curtain falling)
• 0:26 Exaggeration again 
• 0:31 – arc, the knife and Jerry’s movements follow a circular motion
• 0:53 – follow-through of bucket past Tom’s body; drag because the cloth is delayed after Tom’s hand (paw??) and the water droplets coming off of it.
• 1:11 – arc with fragmented smear when he face palms
• 1:14: exaggeration: his eyes literally move planes outside of his head
• 1:21 – squash, Tom’s body squashes in an exaggerated way to slow down and stretches again to get him back to normal Tom
• The show is known for its exaggerated expressions and the multitude of secondary actions going on in the frame. The animators seemed to have used the pose to pose sequencing style instead of straight ahead, but they probably threw that in, too.

• 49:49 – really good example of secondary action. Bugs is looking around (main action) and starts munching on a carrot (secondary action). 

• Example of solid drawing. Something in the foreground, the main part of the action and they’re interacting with the scene around them.

• Staging: establishing shot to see where the characters are. The waterfall flowing over the side of the beaver dam. Then 1:41 as they’re arguing (snarling), our eyes are following Mr. Fox and Badger around the desk.