Week1: 12 Principles of Animation & Good & Bad Animation

12 Principles of Animation

Squash & stretch: give an object a sense of weight or make the character more personal, for example, a figure squeezed or stretched to the point of exaggeration can have a comic effect. Squash and stretch are the most important things in Disney animation.

The more an object is squashed and stretched it looks softer, less squash and
stretch makes an object look stiffer.

Anticipation: when charactersor objectsmake an action that gives viewers a clue about what is going to happen next.

Staging:staging this principle refers to the waythat we present or frame an idea so it’s easily understood by the audience.Bad staging would be if too many things happen at once ina scene we wouldn’t know what to look at

to make audience focus on theactions and the surroundings I could use a full shot.

Straight ahead & pose to pose: these two techniques help to enrich and provide operational details.

Follow-through and overlapping action:when parts of acharacter’s body or object keep moving after the leading part stops this technique adds realism to animations and follows the rule of inertia

Slow in and slow out:when objects or characters move the motion often starts at a slower pace becomes faster and then slows down again before it stops.In frame by frame animation,when we want to make objects move slower frames have to be drawn closer to each other.When we want objects to move quicker we need to draw the frames further away from each other.

Arcs:Most natural motion tends to follow the arch, and animation should follow this principle, following the implied “arc” to achieve a more realistic effect. This principle can be applied to limb movements, to moving joint joints, or to an object thrown along a parabola. One exception is mechanical motion, because it typically moves in a straight line. As an object’s velocity or momentum increases, the curve becomes flatter when it moves forward and more curved when it turns.

Secondary action:a secondary actionis an animation that supports the main actionit adds additional meaning to the primary action

Timing:when actions are happening in animation pauses between actions and their speed are all part of timing it also affects the way we perceive an animation and the message we are getting across this principle gives viewers time to process what is happening in the animation.

Exaggeration:this is a widely used principle and can be applied to any character’s reaction pose and expression by using exaggeration we create a bigger impact on the viewer and the message we are trying to communicate becomes really evidentand more believable.

Solid drawing:reating solid drawings means illustrating objects and characters that make us feel like they are placed in a three-dimensional space and have volume and weight.

Appeal: illustrations to make them look interesting and like able for example by using shapes when designing charactersor by changing the proportions of characters.

Good Animation & Bad Animation

Barbie animated movies were the 3D animation I watched the most as a child.So when I see the topic of good and bad animation, I want to go to see Barbie again, because I have not seen it for many years, I want to know whether the Barbie animation in my eyes is still as good as the childhood memory.Then I saw this video, and I was shocked, because I remember Barbie as exquisite ( probably like Disney’s ‘Rapunzel’).But the reality is that I found a lot of problems with it.Next I will elaborate on the disadvantages I found.

The action of the character is very simple, basically does not reflect the “twelve principles of animation”.One can only say that the movement is in the right direction.The details of the exaggerated movements are too little and will look very pompous.The light is too single and looks very rigid,it will show a sense of plastic.But since these animations were created relatively early,I chose Toy Story, which was released a few years earlier than Barbie, to make a positive case.

In 1995, Pixar’s “Toy Story” marked the era of animation into three-dimensional.1995 to 2000 is the first stage, this stage is the start of three-dimensional animation and the initial development period.

I think one of the factors of Toy Story’s success is that its protagonists are the toys.So the slightly stiff movements and a little bit of plastic are good for the characterization.Of course,the Barbie movement stiffness and plastic feeling of the material compared with Toy Story is not in the same class.