Week 1 - The Beginning (3/26)

**THE ANIMATIONS MADE THIS WEEK (including those discussed in this blog) ARE LINKED HERE: https://youtu.be/FnpI7aUXnXw

 

There was a period of time in elementary school when I was obsessed with animating. I was terrible at it—but I can strongly state that it made me very happy. I remember how working on something and putting all the parts together into a whole gave me so much satisfaction. I hope that this project will give me a break from all my usual work and I can rediscover the happiness I used to feel way back when. Aside from that, I am very much looking forward to successfully animating a smooth, full-length video by June. My plan is to first learn how to animate simple objects, transition into more complicated art (perhaps adding animated effects to videos), and at the end, complete a full animation.

First, I had to figure out HOW to animate- in short, what technique to use so I can have complete control over what I am doing. My easiest option was onion skin mode. What am I talking about? Onion skinning lets you see earlier and later frames as an overlay on the current frame. This lets you see the spacing of your animation, and you can literally draw over your previous frame. Easy! In fact, my younger brother’s drawing iPad and his cool techy pen are perfect for this (naturally, he found out I took his materials for animating, and now he is now hogging the iPad for himself 24/7).

                                     Animating in Onion Skin mode:

My dad decided to help me pick a software program (called FlipaClip)—the first animation I made on this program was extremely basic (honestly, it was good for a beginner like me). I might upgrade to a harder program once I am able to do more. My first animation was a random circle bouncing from ceiling to ground. Why? Well, bouncing is fun, and it contains some of the 12 basic principles of animation, listed here. Over the course of the next weeks, I will try my best to implement these principles into my work:

1)      Squash and Stretch – a fundamental principle. When a ball hits the ground, the force of motion causes it to squash flat, and it widens on impact. This creates an elastic-like quality.

2)      Anticipation—preparation for the main action. Ex: a player kicking a soccer ball would first swing their foot back and steady themselves with their arms.

3)      Staging – when filming a scene, you have to put the camera somewhere, as well as the actors and props. You must direct the viewers attention towards the most important parts of a scene as well as move the story forward.

4)      Straight Ahead Action and Pose-to-Pose—two ways of drawing animation. Straight ahead action is where you draw each frame of an action one after another as you go along. With pose-to-pose, you draw the beginning and end of action, and then start to fill in the frames in-between.

5)      Follow-Through and Overlapping Action—when something moving comes to a stop, some parts may still continue to move.

6)      Ease-In, Ease Out—when you start a car, you don’t accelerate right away, but rather ease into a steady speed.         

7)      Arcs—most living beings – including humans – move in circular paths called arcs.

8)      Secondary actions—gestures that add more dimension to action. They give more personality and insight into what is going on.

9)      Timing—about where on a timeline you put each frame of action is crucial

10)   Exaggeration—presents a character in an extreme way for comedic or dramatic effect. Sometimes more IS better.

11)   Solid Drawing—making sure the animated forms look like they are in a 3D space.

12)   Appeal—people remember the interesting characters. Animated forms should be fun and interesting to look at.

This week, I did manage to make something I was proud of—a lemon (do not even dare to judge me, I am certain this lemon has already brought me halfway to pro-animator level). This might win the award for “most basic animation,” but the problem was that all of the layers were too complicated for a beginner like me. I did not know what order to complete everything in, and it took me two hours to finish a three-second clip. I started off with the physical body of the lemon, and once I was finished with all 68 slides of it blinking, I went back and individually added the stem and leaf to each slide. Yeah… stupid mistake. I hope I can find an order of tasks that works for me in the near future, or it just might be something that I will solve with much time and practice.

As you can see, I have an okay start (I can use ‘meh’ to describe it perfectly)! I hope that over time the process will ease out and I will be able to animate with more speed and control.

Cheers to a completed first week of animating!

 

Works cited:

Ritchie, James. “12 Principles of Animation.” IdeaRocket, 3 Apr. 2020, idearocketanimation.com/13721-12-principles-of-animation-gifs/.

“Onion Skinning in Adobe Animate.” Google Sites, sites.google.com/view/kcaddlc/software-tutorials/adobe-suite/adobe-animate/onion-skinning-in-adobe-animate.

 

*this week I commented on Rachel L, Anoosha S, Michael O, and Hailey A's posts :)