The 12 Principles of Animation, as laid out in The Illusion of Life by Disney animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, are designed to make the animation onscreen broadcast what's happening as easily as possible. They should be treated as a checklist of sorts when animating anything. The animator should always consider where they can be used, to enhance movements and / or communication.
Anticipation is the way an animator will show the energy buildup before a larger movement. It usually involves a smaller, counteraction which gathers up energy before expelling it. It's also used as a visual cue for the audience, letting them know an action is about to take place. Anticipation being applied to an action also delivers a more believable outcome.
(Anticipation - Alan Becker on YouTube)
To give an example of a character using anticipation, here's the Genie from Aladdin. When talking to Aladdin, Genie begins raising his hand. This is to signal to the audience there's a motion happening involving his hand / arm, and they should pay attention to it. It also helps to build up energy, for when he makes the motion of bringing the arm back down in a much grander, bigger motion.
POSE 1 - Hand and forearm up
POSE 2 - Hand and forearm brought down
(Aladdin - dir. Ron Clements and John Musker)
Follow Through goes hand in hand with anticipation, essentially acting as the "other end" to anticipation. Energy is required not just to start a movement, but to stop it too. When a character makes a large action, there's usually parts that will keep moving, even after the main action finishes. It could be a cape flapping, a hat shifting, etc. While it's usually applied to accessories, it also applies to body parts in specific scenarios. For example, if someone punches, then usually there body will still move back a little bit after the punch is complete.
(Follow Through - Alan Becker on YouTube)
An example of this can be seen in WALL-E, as WALL-E leaves his home. He drives along to the doorway, then stops. However, though his body has stopped, his hands and treads move slightly in reaction to the sudden stop.
POSE 1 - Body stops moving
POSE 2 - Hands and treads move in reaction
POSE 3 - Hands and treads settle
(WALL-E - dir. Andrew Stanton)
After being taught this, our task for the day was to make a jumping animation that would include both anticipation and follow through. We should make guides, keep it rough & sketchy, and consider the arc of the jump.
Starting off, I knew that I'd need to make multiple layers for my guide. The neutral start / end positions and the anticipation / follow throughs would be standing on the exact same piece of ground, with overlap in the positions if done on one sheet. So I made 3 different guide layers; one for extremes, one for anticipation / follow through, and one for inbetweens. This was a big help, although did prove a little tricky when trying to inbetween, because I was trying to look through my current sheet at two sheets underneath, instead of the usual one.
I linetested my first attempt, resulting in this.
While it gives off a convincing enough effect, I realised that the anticipation at the beginning didn't signpost the movement coming up well enough. I needed BIGGER movements.
So, I went back to the drawing board (literally), and made more inbetweens at the beginning to give a bigger movement. The arms go up further to a bigger extreme, and thus, give off a better signal.
The second jump feels a lot more natural, with the more obvious anticipation and smoother jump in general.
I think if I was to do this jump again, I would try and give it a little bit more personality to the jump with more unique actions for the anticipation and recoil, instead of generic poses.
Overall, I'm fairly happy with this task. I did hit a bump along the way, but instead of letting it get to me and make the work seem lesser, I took it and improved upon it. The talk on failure last week made me feel a lot differently towards work going wrong, especially comparing this task to when my pendulum swing originally went wrong.
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