DYNAMICS - SECONDARY ACTION

This session focused on secondary actions for objects and people.

First off, we watched "The Twelve Principles of Animation Rap", created by Haydn Spencer.

(credit: Haydn Spencer on Vimeo)

In all honesty, this was a really funny watch, and a pretty great way to get the principles stuck in your head with a great tune! And it briefly talked about the principle we were focusing on; Secondary Actions.

Secondary actions are added to a main action to help give a scene more life, as well as help support the main action. For example, with someone walking, their legs moving would be the primary action, but swinging arms and a bobbing head would both be considered separate secondary actions.

It's important to note that secondary actions shouldn't overtake the primary actions, but should instead act as an emphasis to the primary action.

We watched another Alan Becker Principle video, this one covering secondary actions.

(credit: Alan Becker on YouTube)

Becker gave many more examples of secondary actions, and how they can be used to express different emotions of a character. For example, when someone's knocking a door, their other arm can be used as a means of showing how the character feels through a secondary action. If their fist is clenched, they could be angry and really pounding on the door. A hand with fingers splayed could show a more dainty knock.

For our task, we had to apply a secondary action to a bouncing ball; this could be a swinging tail, ears that flap, etc. I decided to add a little figure sitting on top of the ball, who would bounce up and down as the ball did. I was really enthusiastic for this task, especially since it allowed for more creativity and personality than the other tasks.

I ran into one problem where I wasn't sure what the appropriate distance between two frames would be, which lead to two different versions of frame 12, dubbed "12 v1" and "12 v2". After using both and comparing outcomes, I found that 12 v1 worked better.

After that, I still had some time left, so I decided to challenge myself with my second animation. I wanted to have it somewhat inspired by the Portal game series, by having the ball bounce along, open up a portal, fall through it, and continue bouncing after falling out the second portal. I didn't run into any issues with this animation; I thought that was surprising, given the more complex arcs and the amount of things in the air I had to manage.

In conclusion, I feel like I'm happy with secondary actions. My outcomes came out quite well, and I'm eager to apply them to more complex things in the future!