>> Animation PRINCY. (The TWELVE..!)

Principles of Animation:

1. Timing and Spacing
   
2. Squash and Stretch
3. Anticipation
   
4. Staging
5. Straight Ahead Action and Pose to Pose
6. Follow Through and Overlapping Action
7. Slow In and Slow Out
8. Arcs
9. Secondary Action
10. Exaggeration
11. Personality
12. Appeal

I treat principles as guidelines for my animation. Even if you are not having reference you can include all these principles & your animation will be worth watching. Knowing this principle is easy but understanding & applying in to the work takes years to master.
According to me there are 3 levels:
1. knowing principles & applying it in your work
2. Learning to break the principles
3. Creating your own guidelines (Principles), building your own work flow (usually the level of creative heads & directors)

Animators are on the first stage, they are very much concern about the movement of the character and application of the principle to make it move nice and smooth.
Then gradually these things become normal for an experienced animator & he starts putting more attention on the behavior & the attitude of the character. Then one will apply the principles and starts bending them & some time breaks them to produce a gag out of it. This requires deep understanding of the principles otherwise breaking of principle will appear as an error rather than an appeal. Example, we anticipate before an action. If my action is faster I have to anticipate it more in order to make it believable, to get registration from the audience and that something big or wild is going to happen. But how many times we have seen in the Chuck Jones animation or other Warner bros shows where character is taking big anticipation & following up by slow action.

This is my attempt to jot down all the points about the animation principle long with my experimentation. This is an attempt to know more by exploring.

Timing and Spacing

Timing & Posing is the essence of any animation. People spend their life learning, applying & mastering these. Trial and error is the way to learn it. Mastering this is possible only with the experience, personal experimentation and extra learning.

ð Actual duration of an action is timing. Timing gives meaning and adds purpose to the movement both physical and emotional.

· Timing defines weight of an object more than any other principle.

· Timing also indicates the mood, emotional state of the character and gives personality

· Timing can also affect the perception of mass of an object, size of an object.

Some says timing is the speed of an action which also communicates the idea behind the same to the viewer. Let’s dig more in here. Time is a universal term. We use it in number of ways. I remembered a formula which helped me to understand this principle more in depth.

Timing= Distance/Speed OR Speed= Distance/ Timing

By this equation I learnt that to make any movement convincing, timing is not the only variable factor but we need to keep the distance of the movement in mind too. Many times in production I used to get corrections that my motions are appearing snappy and I used to spend hours rectifying it. Later on I found out that to play with the speed, changing the timing is not the only option but I can also play with the distance on the motion. Many times we do solve the problems with experimentations but after realizing the relation between the above three I can correct my animation faster & better. While timing anything in animation following things needs to be considered

· Gravity

· Air Resistance

· Friction

· And the Surface

ð Spacing is the pattern of the movement in given time. Proper spacing of keys, pose, frames or drawing will makes our animation appear skillful. Spacing adds texture to the movements. More key or drawings between poses slows and smoothes the action. Fewer keys or drawings make the action faster and crisper.

Spacing examples:

§ Slow in – slow out; § Fast in – fast out; § Slow in – fast out; § Fast in – slow out