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Welcome to your first 3 lessons in stop-motion animation

Atop the screen is a menu which has the lessons on, you can click those links to navigate to your lessons of choice, or you can navigate to them by simply scrolling down this page.

1

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The Foundation of smooth animation

Movement is not linear. It starts off slow, builds speed and then slowly comes to a stop.

This is the case for all movements in life. It builds, reaches its peak and then slows.

 

Without following this natural law in your own animations, even at a minute scale, you'll be inviting jittery, choppy moves to arrive in your films, like the man below.

No Ease in / out:

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To ease in and ease out properly, you should have more frames with smaller movements at both the start and the end of the action you're animating.

With Ease in / out:

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As you see above. The purple object begins slowly, before the gaps between the moves get wider and wider. At the mid-point of the move, the gaps between the moves will be at their peak, before gradually decreasing to a stop.

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Once you have the ease in and out basics down, you can mess with the parameters of the principle to achieve different effects. Either for stylistic reasons, or to show velocity, weight of objects or momentum.

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Example 1: Velocity
Use ease in and out to show the speed of objects. A car starting and moving off, easing slowly with plenty of frames tells one story. A car starting and then quickly zooming off, only a few frames this time, tells another story.

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Example 2: Momentum
When objects arrive, ease out to show momentum falling off, like a car coming to a stop would. But if the car was going too quick, and crashed into a wall for example, though a lot of the energy would fall off suddenly, you could still ease out all the individual car parts to show the car coming to rest after the fact.

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More examples and more details are featured in the video lesson above.

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Ease in out
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2

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Two principles in one...

Timing

Slow moves require more frames, fast moves require less frames... This is Timing 

 

Each frame captures a specific moment of movement, the amount of these moments of movement captured, influences many different variables like how natural the animation looks or the emotion that's conveyed.

 

To use timing properly in a scene, when an object or character is completing a move, identify the keyframes that capture the essential moments of it. These frames mark the beginning and end of each action or movement. 

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You can establish the timing and rhythm of your animation, by planning how many frames you’re going to put in between these frames, with reference to your frames per second. These frames help create smooth and fluid motion, ensuring a natural transition between key poses.

 

Utilising timing can create different effects in your animations. For example, it can influence its perceived weight by the viewer.

 

The slower an object moves, the heavier it’ll seem. Vice versa with a lightweight object moving quickly:

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Arcs

In the “Illusion of Life” book by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, they identified that in our reality, it’s rare that things move in a straight line. In the real world, movements occur along curved paths, for example: Planets, animals, snow and even us humans all follow arcs in movement.

 

An arc could be tall and narrow or wide and small, it depends on the object and context. A general rule of thumb will see slow moving objects have big curving arcs while fast moving will be wide and small curving.

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Understanding and utilising arcs in stop motion animation can significantly elevate the quality and realism of your work. We’re constantly moving in arcs; we just don’t notice it. 

 

Below shows how adding a slight arc to the turn of a character's head can improve the realism of the move. First, it's a linear turn, then, a slight lift is added in.

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More examples and more details are included in the video lesson above.

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Arcs & Timing

3

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Allow the audience to register whats happening...

Rookie animations can appear confusing, and nine times out of ten, it's because they've not used these techniques.

 

To anticipate a movement in animation, it just means the preparation for an action. If the main action was for a character to run away, you'd anticipation it by taking a few frames where the character winds their body and arms back, before breaking into the move.

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Follow through means the movement after the action has taken place. If a superhero came into land, the follow-through action would be bending of the knees, maybe even lean to absorb the left-over momentum. 

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Follow through can also refer to how parts of something can continue moving after the initial movement has taken place. 

 

For example, when a superhero comes to a stop. He may stop rather promptly, but his clothes carry on some of that momentum once he stops, this is called drag. Drag is the movement of any objects that only move from being affected by a main action, like in this example, the cape flaps behind the hero because he's been running rather quickly.

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Anticipating and following through is not just good for realism and clarity, it's good for conveying information.

 

Especially when paired with other principles like timing!

 

For example, if a character pulls their arm back far and really snappy, you know their punch is about to hurt. 

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More examples and more details are included in the video lesson above.

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Anticipation & Follow Through
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4

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“The state of being full of life or vigour”

Unlock The Rest Of The Training

You've just completed 3 lessons out of 25. Im no good at maths, but even I can work out that it means you still have 22 full lessons to complete on animation. If you took value from this sample of the training, then click the link below to get more information about the full course.

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