Speaker 1: Hi, welcome to Animation for Anyone. My name's Alex. Today's lesson is a bit of a crash course in animation. We'll start with how animation works, and then I'll share with you the six ideas that I think are the most important to understand when you first start animating. And after that, I wanna show you my thought process of how we can use multiple animation ideas at the same time. Let's jump in. I think the easiest way to understand how animation is working is by looking at a flip book. If you're anything like me, you might've made little animation flip books out of your exercise books at school. You draw a picture, and then a slightly different picture, and you keep going until you flip through your pages and see your pictures move. This is how pretty much all animation works. We create still images and play them back quickly to create the illusion of motion. If you've never tried it, maybe spend a few minutes now. It's pretty fun. Flip books are a good way to visualize animation, but they're a little bit hard to demonstrate the ideas I wanna explore today. So instead, I'm gonna use a coin and capture the visuals digitally. That lets me play back the animation at a constant predictable speed of 24 frames per second. In future videos, I'll show you how to do this, but for now, we're really just looking at the ideas behind the animation and how to plan out the movement. So if I want to animate this coin moving from one side of the piece of paper to the other, I take a picture of it, move it a little, and then take another picture, and then keep going until I get to the other side. Now, when I play the images back, it feels as though the coin is moving across the screen. Looking at it though, I think it feels a bit weird. I think the most important question you can ask yourself while you're animating is how does this motion feel? This is my guiding principle while I animate. All of the fundamentals we talk about today and in future lessons really come back to this one question. So if I ask myself, how does this motion feel? I'd probably describe it as jumpy or jittery. Let's look at why that might be happening. Below the coin, I've illustrated the exact spacing of each of the frames. You can see that it's not very even. There are frames that are really close together, and there are frames that are really far apart from each other, and that's because I've not been very deliberate about how far I move the coin each time. So if this motion feels jumpy or jittery now, I think we can make the motion feel a bit smoother by making the spacing between the coins a little bit more even. Now that I've evened up the spacing, you can see that the coin moves a little bit more consistently across the screen. There's no more jumpiness. At the moment, the coin moves across the screen in one second, or 24 pictures. Let's see what happens if I move it across the screen in less time. I think we can see two really clear things here. The coin moves much faster, and the spacing between the coin is much larger than before. Let's see what happens if we make the coin take longer to cross the screen. Okay, I think that the results here are pretty clear as well. The coin feels like it's moving more slowly, and the spacing between the coin is much closer than before. So this is the first big idea in animation I wanted to show you. Things feel fast when they're far apart, and slow when they're closer together. So if I ask myself now, how does this motion feel? I'd say smooth, or consistent, but maybe a little unnatural. The coin starts moving suddenly, and then stops moving suddenly. So if we wanted to make a more natural feeling, the coin could start moving slowly, speed up in the middle, and then slow down at the end. We start slow by having the coins closer together, and then gradually get further and further apart, and then we slow the coin down by making the spacing closer and closer until we come to a stop. I think that's starting to feel a bit more natural. For this next step, I'm going to loop the animation so that the coin travels from the left of the screen to the right, and then back again, using the exact same spacing. For this next step, I'm going to exaggerate the speeding up and slowing down a little. You can see that the spacing's changed, so the parts that were close together before are even closer together now, and the parts that were far apart are even further apart.

Speaker 2: Let's see what happens if we exaggerate it even more. You can see now it feels a bit more lively or zippy.

Speaker 1: We don't always have to start slow and finish slow either. Here's an example of how changing the acceleration can entirely change the way the motion feels. In this example, I have a coin that slowly speeds up, gets really fast, and then changes direction suddenly. This gives us a kind of bouncy feeling. One thing that I think is quite important to mention at this point is that these motions all feel quite different, but they have the exact same timing. They all take 24 frames to get from one side of the screen to the other. All of the difference in the way that they feel comes from the amount of space we put between the frames. So this is the second big idea I wanted to show you. If we want to make things slow down or speed up, we gradually get closer and closer together or further and further apart from each other. This is called acceleration and deceleration. Some people call it easing, or you can just call it speeding up and slowing down. So far, all of our animation has been done using a coin, which doesn't change shape. I'm going to start using a cutout piece of paper so that we can change the shape as we animate. In this first example, I'm gonna take the fastest frame of animation and stretch the frame out a little. This changes the feeling of the animation. I think it feels a little less rigid,

Speaker 2: maybe more zippy, more lively. Let's try changing the shape again,

Speaker 1: but this time we'll squash it. I think the best example to demonstrate squash would be our bouncy animation. I'll start by stretching out the frame where we're moving the fastest and then squash it where we change direction. This is going to make it feel a little bit more like a bouncing ball. Squash and stretch is the third big idea I wanted to share with you. It's great for adding a little bit of life to your animation and making it feel less rigid. It also really helps the audience understand what the object is made of. This coin doesn't squash or stretch as it bounces, so it feels quite hard, whereas a rubber ball might squash and stretch heaps, which is what makes it feel rubbery and stretchy. So that's three big ideas covered, and I've got three more on my website. The first is anticipation. Anticipation is a really important part of animation, but it's something that's easy to forget about when you're first starting out. Anticipation does two key things. It builds up energy, and it also gives the audience an indication that something's about to happen, which really helps with clarity. When I think of anticipation, I think of a spring. It builds up energy in one direction and then releases it in the other direction. You might like to think of someone jumping. Before they jump up in the air, they often move down to build tension in their body. This downwards motion is the anticipation. In this example, I have a ball that moves quite suddenly and then slows down. To make it feel more natural, I could add a little bit of squash to anticipate the movement. This makes it feel like we're building up energy and releasing it all at once. The second idea is anticipation.

Speaker 2: It's a little bit similar to what I just showed you, but it's a little bit more natural.

Speaker 1: The fifth idea I'd like to talk about is overshoot. Overshoot is like a mirror image to anticipation. Imagine you have a really big movement, go too far, and then bounce back. Overshoot helps add weight or springiness to your animation. In this example, I've added a double overshoot to the ball as it springs back into place. You might've noticed that all of our motion so far is arcs. Things in nature don't usually follow a perfectly straight line. More often than not, natural movements follow some sort of arc. Arcs tend to add flow to your motion. In this example, I've taken our coin and rather than moving it directly across the page, I've swung it down like a pendulum. This gives it an entirely different feeling. Okay, so those are the six big ideas I wanted to talk about today. Let's have a bit of a recap. Our first idea was about speed. If we make things closer together, they move more slowly, and if we make them further apart, they move more quickly. Our second idea is about spacing and acceleration. If we gradually get closer and closer together or further and further apart, things feel like they're slowing down or getting faster. The third idea is about squash and stretch and how using it can add a bit of speed to your animation. The fourth idea is about adding anticipation to your motion. This will help build up energy and sometimes add clarity. Our fifth idea is overshoot. This is where we let objects bounce back after a big movement. And our sixth idea is about arcs. This is where we decide if we want our motion to follow a straight line or a more natural flowing arc through space. So the question is, how do we use all of these ideas as we move through our animation? The question is, how do we use all of these ideas at the same time? If you're working on an animation, you can ask yourself, how does this motion feel? The answer could be anywhere from, it's great, I love it, to could be better, or it could just be, this feels wrong. If your answer is anything other than great, I love it, you can use these ideas to start asking questions that will help improve your animation. Does the speed feel right? Should we change the spacing to adjust the acceleration? Should we be using some squash or stretch? Or maybe we need some anticipation. Are the arcs working well? Or do we need some overshoot to help sell the weight? I'm going to walk through a simple animation now and use these questions to help push our animation to the great, I love it part of the graph here. So for this animation, I'm trying to make a ball jump in the air and land on the other side of the screen. Let's just move the ball upwards, upwards, upwards, and then come back down again. It takes one second or 24 frames to get to that point. And let's play it back at full speed. Now, if I ask myself, how does this motion feel? I'd say not that great. It feels unnatural, it feels stiff, it doesn't have any weight to it. So this is where we can start asking those questions and apply those animation ideas that we've been talking about. I'll start with the most obvious thing, to me at least. I think this motion could use an arc. If I imagine a cannibal flying through the air, I don't imagine a straight line up and a straight line down. I picture more of an arc. This is because it's being affected by gravity. So let's add an arc to this motion.

Speaker 2: Okay, so I think that's starting to feel better straight away.

Speaker 1: Let's see what other ideas we can start working into this animation. I think we could use some squash to create an anticipation. So it feels like the ball is building up energy before the jump. I think that we could exaggerate the acceleration by using a couple of frames of stretch in the fastest part of the motion. And we could also use a bit of squash to create an overshoot when the ball lands. This will give it a bit more weight

Speaker 2: and make it feel a bit more springy. Okay, I think that's looking even better.

Speaker 1: It's a totally usable piece of animation. But if I ask myself one more time, how does this motion feel? I'd say it falls into this area here. So if I look at these ideas again, I can think about which ideas I could exaggerate even more. I think that we could push the anticipation even further. So it feels like it's shaking and building up energy just before it jumps. I think that I could fine tune the spacing a little bit more so that the acceleration is clearer as it leaves the ground. And I think that I could exaggerate the overshoot even more by adding a stretch frame. This means that it'll have a kind of double overshoot making it feel really springy. And this is the final result. I think that it's got a lot more energy and personality now. And that's it. Six of the biggest ideas in animation and how to start applying them to any animation you wanna make. Thanks for sticking with me. Now for some homework. Choose an animation medium. It could be anything from a flip book to a program that you're learning and take one of the six ideas we've talked about here today, like anticipation or arcs and create a short animation based on that, maybe one to two seconds long. Then take a different idea, maybe squash or stretch and create a second animation. Once again, one to two seconds long. And lastly, create a short animation that uses both of these ideas at the same time. Hopefully you've enjoyed this crash course. We'll be looking at these individual ideas and many more in future episodes. See you next time. This is a video that was created by the students and is for educational purposes only. If you are interested in learning more about animation, please check out the classes and tutorials on the YouTube channel. I'm your host, Dan. I'll see you next time. Bye.