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| The Three Biggest Ideas in Animation: bestsoftwaref |
In this lesson, I want to show you how we can simplify all the little ideas we learn about animation into the three most important ideas: timing, posing, and spacing. And then after that, I'll show you how we can think about these ideas one after the other, to help us problem solve and plan our animation. Posing Timing is simply how long something takes to happen. This character takes 18 frames to complete one cycle of their loop. Posing is what our animation looks like when we press the pause button. If we're talking about posing, we're talking about the still image. And spacing is the relationship between the still images over time. Basically, it's the space between the frames. Animation is simply a collection of still images played one after the other. Animators sometimes refer to these still images as poses.
Historically, posing would refer to how a character is drawn, but really, posing can be anything we show the audience. It can be a simple shape or color.
It can be a photograph of an ordinary object. Even though a pose is a static image, it can show movement, weight, emotion. Timing Posing allows us to communicate with the audience before we even make our pictures move. You may have heard of some of these ideas in animation before. We'll dig into their meanings in future lessons. But for now, just know that they all fit into the category of posing.
The Three Biggest Ideas in Animation: bestsoftwaref
The second big idea in animation is timing. Timing simply refers to how long something takes to happen. As animators, we usually control the timing of our animation by deciding how many frames our motion takes and how quickly we show those frames.
If we want the motion to take one second and our frame rate is 24 frames per second, we use 24 frames for that motion. If we want the motion to take half a second, we use 12 frames. Timing can be a little bit hard to guess. So you can use film reference or a stopwatch to help you find a starting point. I filmed this motion and it took 1.66 seconds.
The Three Biggest Ideas in Animation: bestsoftwaref
So if I was to animate it, I might start with 40 frames. Another way to approach it is to imagine the scene playing out in your head and tap along to the rhythm of the action. Using a free stopwatch app, I've recorded the time between each tap and then used that to plan out my animation.
Spacing Timing is another big idea that combines lots of smaller ideas within it. The third big idea in animation is spacing. This is the relationship between posing and timing. The character in your motion really comes from the spacing. And the spacing is simply the space between the frames. I have 24 drawings of a ball. They all look like the same ball and I can tell they're in different places.
So I figure, if I play them back, one after the other, we'll get a sense of movement. So the ball definitely feels like it's moving, but it's moving a little strangely, it's jittery and jumpy. If I overlay the frames, we can start to see how the poses relate to each other over time.
Here, I've adjusted the spacing between the frames, but I've kept the shapes and the timing the same. Technically, we have changed the still images by moving them around a little, so we've changed the posing slightly. But we've really focused on how the still images relate to each other over time.
This is why spacing gets its own special category. Spacing gives a sense of acceleration, rhythm, flow, and energy. Do we want the motion to feel bouncy or gentle, heavy or light? Do we want the motion to feel smooth or shaky? All of these things can be achieved by experimenting with spacing. You can study spacing with a clear sheet of plastic or paper and tracking motion over time.
Notice how the acceleration works and the arcs the motion makes through space. And now the big question, why is it important to think about these three ideas while we Why animate? Animation can be a time-consuming and complicated process, but thinking about these three ideas can help us plan and problem-solve more quickly.
This gives us more time to experiment and achieve the motion we're looking for. In our first class, we asked ourselves, how does this motion feel? And if the answer's, not great, we can start narrowing down the solutions. I would always start with the posing. I think of posing like ingredients in a cake. If I want to make a carrot cake, I need to make sure I've got some carrots in the mix. In animation, if I want a character to look one direction, I need to make sure I've got poses, like still images, of them looking in that direction. If we want them to feel squashy or stretchy, or have some anticipation, we need to make sure we've got still images of that too.
Without the still images in place, we don't have the ingredients we need to tell the story we want, and no amount of timing changes or spacing changes are going to help us with that. At the start of this class, I mentioned that every image could be considered a pose.
The Three Biggest Ideas in Animation: bestsoftwaref
So how do we know which ones to work on first? I focus on a handful of key poses. These are usually at the extremes of the motion. So in this head turn, I've chosen four, the start pose, the end pose, and then this squash pose and this overshoot pose at the end. These are the poses that give us the most information, and all the other poses fit nicely between them.
The Three Biggest Ideas in Animation: bestsoftwaref
This actually introduces us to a concept called key framing, but we'll dig into that more deeply in a future lesson. Once I've figured out the poses, I look at the timing. If the character is looking from here to here, does this timing feel right, or does this timing feel right? This is where I decide on the pace of the motion and the rhythm. If you have your timing and posing under control, you are 80% of the way to making a great animation.
The Three Biggest Ideas in Animation: bestsoftwaref
Lastly, I look at spacing. This is where I play with acceleration, flow, and energy. It's also where I try to fix any jitteriness or jumpiness that might have happened. When we're starting out, it's tempting to try and fix the spacing first, but if we need to change the timing or posing afterwards, we'll need to readjust the spacing anyway.
The Three Biggest Ideas in Animation: bestsoftwaref
So this is why I leave spacing until last. So let's recap. Posing is how your animation looks when we press the pause button. Timing is how long your motion takes. And spacing is the space between the frames. When we're planning and problem-solving, start with posing, then fine-tune your timing, and lastly, look at the spacing. Hopefully you can see, by thinking about animation with these three big ideas, you can problem-solve more quickly and really fine-tune how your motion feels.
The Three Biggest Ideas in Animation: bestsoftwaref
Now a little bit of homework. Try to create a simple pose in whatever medium you like to communicate each of these ideas: heavy, soft, hot, bored, eager. I hope you've enjoyed this class. Don't forget to check out the other videos in this series. And I'll catch you next time.
