Speaker 1: Today I'm sharing four animation exercises and not one of them is a bouncing ball. There's the old saying practice makes perfect but if I'm honest I'm not really that interested in perfect animation. I'm mostly focused on giving you a set of tools that will help you make the animation you want to make. Practice is great at building confidence using those tools though. So in this class I've put together four exercises that will help you build your confidence as an animator, practice the skills you already have and maybe pick up a few tips and tricks along the way. These are all beginner friendly but I'll show you how to increase their difficulty if you want an extra challenge. I'll be using Animate CC but you can use any software or medium you like. I've tried to keep things fresh and come up with some new exercises you might not have seen before. They're called the magic dot, the jelly jump, the switch, which side note is maybe the most useful animation shortcut there is, and the morph. Let's dig in. The first exercise is something I call the magic dot. This is where we create a simple dot and try to make it as interesting as possible using only the power of animation. So I'm going to create a new scene. It's at 12 frames per second and it's 1920 by 1080. You can do anything you like. I like 12 frames per second for 2D. So the first thing I'm going to do is just draw a dot and then I'll turn on onion skinning and make a new empty frame. And then my goal now is just to bring as much life to this dot as possible. And the reason I like this exercise is because you don't really need to be able to draw to do it. You can be a stop motion animator, you can be a motion graphics designer, you can be trying things out for the first time and you can really get a sense of what different spacing does to the speed and the energy of your motion. So if I want to make things move slowly I make them close together and if I want to make them fast I make them further apart. You can see I'm animating on arcs at the moment. Let's see what happens when I want to animate on a straight line. Be nice and quick and slow down really quickly. And now maybe I want to do some extra fast motion. So I'm going to start using a smear. It's good to know that this isn't stretch or squash, this is a smear because it's using different volume. So this is a bit more like a motion blur in live action footage. So I'm just going to smear this out, go really quick and then slow down really quickly. Let's see how that looks. Yeah as you can see you can get some really interesting movement very rapidly and you can just experiment, make mistakes, make new discoveries really quickly. This exercise is fast enough that you can do it multiple times and test out different ideas. So I'm going to make a new layer on top of the old layer and try again. This time I'm going to try to add some depth to the image by making the dot bigger as it gets closer to us and smaller and have tighter spacing as it gets further away. Each of these passes only takes you know a few minutes so I'm able to play around with lots of little ideas. Just as an experiment I decided to join all of these dots together and it created quite a cool abstract animation. It moves in a pretty appealing way and that's because all of the elements have special attention paid to their spacing and arcs. This won't just be the case for abstract animation, pretty much any object or character you animate will benefit from spacing and timing ideas that you learn with this exercise. Next up we have the jelly jump. In this exercise we're going to try to make a block of jelly or jello, depending on where you live, jump in the air and settle down. We're focusing on creating weight using anticipation and overshoot. So we have a drawing of some jelly here in Animate CC. I've split it up into layers so that I can lock the background layers. The first thing I'm going to do is create the most important keyframes. So we've got our starting frame, I'll create a new frame at the top of the jump and I'll duplicate the first frame and use it as the final frame. I'll make it hold for a while by pressing F5 and I'll play that back. That doesn't really feel like a piece of jelly jumping right now. So what do I need to add? Well I'm going to add a anticipation pose. So this is where it squishes down a little bit and to do that rather than redrawing it, you can redraw it if you're so inclined but in this example I'm not going to. I'm just going to transform it. So I'm moving the center transformation, like the orientation point for the transformation, down to the base so that as I transform it the base doesn't move around too much. I'm going to squish it down and then what we know about squash and stretch is that it needs to retain volume. So if I squish it down it also needs to squash outwards and let's see if that feels about right. I think yeah, I think maybe just a little bit further out. Yeah okay, I think that's about right. It goes into the air and then I'm going to have a squash pose when it comes back down and this squash is a bit of overshoot. So I'm just going to make a new keyframe here by pressing F6 and that means that this one I can squash down to a similar thing to what I did with anticipation. So now I have the extremes. So we've got first pose, anticipation, we've got the jumping pose, the overshoot and then the settle pose. Okay so that's pretty cool. Now I think we need to look at the spacing here. So we want the motion to explode upwards, hang in the air and then come back down quickly. So to do that I'm just going to make a new keyframe and I'm going to make this one ease into this pose that's ahead of it. And then I'm going to ease out of this pose here and this is really weighted towards that top pose. So I'm just experimenting with the timing here and if I'm honest I think the timing all feels a bit crazy. So it feels a bit slow in the air doesn't it? So what I think we need to do is change it so it's not on threes there and on three there. And then I think this overshoot is a little bit slow as well. So I'm going to move this around. So that feels pretty cool but it doesn't feel a lot like jelly and I think one of the reasons jelly feels the way it does is because it has loads and loads of overshoots. So when it comes back down I think we could overshoot further. So rather than coming to its final pose here let's just put a series of overshoots that get less and less as they go along. I think that that's feeling a lot more bouncy and fun. At the moment this feels a bit choppy because the project's at 12 frames per second and we're skipping every other frame. So it'd be good to fill in the gaps with some in-betweens. This is feeling pretty nice now. There are loads of other things you could try when you're doing it yourself. You could see how many overshoots you could fit in at the end or maybe you could play around with adding a stretch frame like I'm doing here. This is a fun exercise because it's a simple way to practice overshoot and it also makes you think about a pretty common five pose pattern and that's pose, anticipation, action or breakdown, overshoot, and end pose. This is something that's really useful for loads of different kinds of animation. If you want to make this exercise more difficult you can try putting another cube of jelly on top and animating it responding to the cube below. A third exercise is something I call the switch. Our goal here is to transition between the two very different keyframes as quickly and easily as possible. We'll do this by hiding the transition behind motion. This is something that sleight of hand magicians use to hide things from the audiences and it's endlessly useful in animation. You could take a lot of drawings or some sort of really simple animation and just put it in the middle of the cube. This is something that I endlessly use in animation. You could take a lot of drawings or some sort of real sort of thinky problem solving to figure out how to get from this keyframe to this keyframe. But what I want to do now is show you that you can hide this morphing behind some motion and your audience's brains will fill in the gaps for you. I'm going to duplicate this keyframe and because they're basically at the same spot I'm going to use anticipation like a little jumping motion to hide this transformation. So we anticipate down and then for this pose I'm going to duplicate it. I'm just going to overshoot upwards. So this makes it feel like we go down, we travel upwards really quickly and then settle back down. Now we'll just time this out a little bit better. So I'll hold for five frames, dissipate for four frames, overshoot for two and then hold. Now these are guesstimates so let's see how they work. So you can see straight away just a couple of drawings, no real sort of morphing. We're able to get from one keyframe to the other really quickly and now I'll just go in and fill in a couple of easing, easing in between some slow in slow out sort of thing. So I'm just going to duplicate this and see how that looks. So you can see really quickly I'm able to get between two very different keyframes very quickly. We don't always need to use this anticipate overshoot formula. If we're moving our character or our object across the screen, so over here, we can just use a little bit of easing to hide this transformation. So in this case, I'm going to have a really subtle start to the motion. What this will do is sort of lead the audience to expect a big movement and then I'll just keep going across. So we're building up a little bit of momentum here. Now I'll take my next frame. I'm switching right at the fastest point of the motion. So if we switch at the fastest point of the motion, that's when it's going to be the least obvious that we're changing shape entirely. So that works pretty well and I might just make a little bit of a subtle transformation here. It's not essential, I don't think, because most of the work's done for us already, but I'm just going to squash it down a little bit and then I might overshoot upwards here. And that just relates to the height change that's happening. So it feels like it's moving upwards, overshooting, and then settling back down. And we can use this technique in loads of different situations. So if I want to switch from a more complicated shape like this heart to a skull, you can see I've mapped out a few keyframes here. We've got the first keyframe, the anticipation frame, the overshoot frame, and the settle frame. One thing that's different with this example is that I've actually gone to the effort of redrawing these keyframes. So this isn't just a transformation of the other heart frame. So you can see here I've created stretch in the skull by extending the jawbone down and then it compresses here. So what I'm doing now is just creating a little bit of follow-through, overlapping motion, so that it feels like the jawbone follows the skull up a little bit. That just loosens things up a little bit. And now I'm just going to overshoot a little bit with the skull, just to give it a bit more weight. I'll test it out, maybe retime it a little bit now. So you can see straight away that this would have been quite a hard thing to morph between, between this thing and this thing. They're quite complicated shapes, especially the skull. If you want to really push this idea, you can even use it to create stylized character animation by popping between key poses. Our fourth exercise is called the morph. This is a lot like the switch, but rather than hiding the transition between two different keyframes, we're going to exaggerate it. So with this exercise, we want to take two very different keyframes and blend between them. In this example, I'm using a square and a triangle. The simplest way to do this would be to overlay the two keyframes and just in between the shapes. So this is what I'm doing here. I'm focusing on easing during the motion. So it feels nice and soft, but as you can see, it looks kind of cool, but I don't think we're really embracing the transition. So when I'm thinking about morphs, I like to think about the transitionary state and what interest we can bring to the motion by experimenting with what happens in the middle. So for this example, I decided to make the 2D square rotate through space and become 3D for a moment as it morphs into the triangular shape. Another direction I could go would be to have a slightly gooey transition where the shape melts and twists as it morphs. The main thing to think about is how to entertain the audience with the transition and add some interesting surprising detail. I find morphs are usually easier to animate using straight ahead animation. So animating one frame after the other. I'll keep the final keyframe in mind, but I won't start referencing it until I get to the end of the process. Adding a broad motion like movement, anticipation or rotation can help add interest. It's also helpful to think about what the object is made of and showing that in the frames you make can be a good way to make the morph look more interesting. In this example, I'm transitioning between a flower and a dagger. This is a more complicated transition, but I'll use the same ideas here. I'm adding a simple rotation to the dagger, which I'll carry over into the movement of the flower. And I'm thinking about how each of the parts could be revealed in interesting ways. So I'm taking the handle of the dagger and splitting it so it blooms open to reveal the petals. And then the handle grows out of the center of the flower like a plant might. I've also carried some of that rotational movement from the flower into the petals as they fall off and disappear. And there you go, four ways to practice your animation skills. Start simple, don't be afraid to try each of these exercises multiple times. And if you want to learn more about animation fundamentals, check out the other classes on this channel. If you've got ideas for future classes, let me know in the comments below and I'll catch you next time.