12 Principles Of Animation

12 Principles Of Animation

• 1 Squash and stretch

When a ball is falling the shape appears to stretch out and then when it hits the ground, the pressure of the impact squashes the shape down.

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• 2 Anticipation
• Anticipation is the pause and wait for an action to happen to get a reaction.
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• 3 Staging
• Staging is placing your character in the correct pose that is appealing to the audience and also tests that the audience understand what your character is doing. The best way to test this is by turning the character into a silhouette, if the pose can still be identified in silhouette form then this is a good example of staging.
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• 4 Straight Ahead Action and Pose to Pose
• The main key frames or poses of the character, for example the contact or passing poses.
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• 5 Follow Through and Overlapping Action
• A follow through action is when a looser body part carries on moving after the main body part has finished moving. For example when moving your arm, the wrist will continue to move after the arm stops.
• An overlapping action is the different movement rates, for example the arm will move at a different timing rate than the head.
• This video is a good example of the different timing rates, the bag is moving at a different rate to the character and the arms and legs are moving at a different time to his head.

• 6 Slow In and Slow Out

Slow in and slow out shows how the movement slowly gains speed into an action. For example and car doesn't pull off and is straight in at full speed, it eases into the action and gains speed and this is the same when stopping, the car will slowly decrease in speed.

This best visual example is a pendulum's movement.

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• 7 Arc

• An arc is the line of movement, where there are arcs is usually showing the natural movements of the object, usually with ball joints.
• The faster the movement the straighter the arc line.

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• 8 Secondary Action
• A secondary action is a movement that accompanies the main action. For example two people talking would be the main action but the secondary action is that the person talking could be tapping their foot. The secondary action should only be subtle and not distract the viewer from the main action.
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• 9 Timing
• Timing is the number of frames between key poses to give the illusion of life.
• The the smaller the space between poses the slower the action, meaning more frames between poses. The faster the action the less frames between are needed.
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• 10 Exaggeration

Exaggeration is used to push movements further to add more appeal to an action. Exaggeration can used to create extremely cartoony movements, or incorporated with a little more restrain to more realistic actions. Whether it's for a stylised animation or realistic, exaggeration should be implemented to some degree.

If you have a realistic animation you can use exaggeration to make a more readable or fun movement while staying true to reality. For example, if a character is preparing to jump off a diving board you can push them down just a little bit further before they leap off. You can also use exaggeration in the timing as wall to enhance the different movements or help to sell the weight of a character.

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• 11 Solid drawing

Creating a solid drawing to showing weight and volume in an image. This can be created with the posing of the character, if they have their hands on their hips, have their weight transferred to the one hip and then twist them around slightly to create the illusion of being 3D.

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• 12 Appeal

This can be applied to many areas of animation, such as appeal in posing. The most obvious example would be in the character design. Making the character pleasing and relatable to the audience.

Twinning

Twinning is finding the natural movement when both halves of the body are mirroring the same movement.

For example when a ballerina is lifting both arms up at the same time, to show a natural movement an animator will have the one arm move slightly quicker or bend the arm further than the mirrored arm.