Principles of Animation for Motionographers – Part 3 of 3

Posted October 21st, 2009 / By Jamie Peterson in Resources, Tutorials

This is the third and final post in a 3-part series where we have been looking at the Principles of Animation, developed in the early years of Walt Disney animation as they were pioneering the young animation field. In Part 1, we looked at squash and stretch, anticipation, and staging. In Part 2, we looked at animation processes and techniques using straight ahead action, pose to pose, follow through, slow in and out, and arcs. In this post, we will be looking at secondary action, timing, exaggeration, and appeal.

SECONDARY ACTION

Secondary action is used to enhance the primary action. Secondary action will often give your primary action much more impact, but if overused, it will only muddle what is going on and confuse the viewer. If this happens, you should consider removing the secondary action or staging the scene differently.

Maxim Zhestkov / art film / personal project / 2006 (click to view QT video in new window)

Maxim Zhestkov’s works are great examples of using secondary action to enhance simple actions, all while using simple shapes. In the linked example above, there is a simple action: a circle moving across the screen, but it is only made interesting using the focal point due to the secondary actions of the other circles when they react.

Secondary action can take place before, during or after the primary action. The start of a secondary action during a major action can go unnoticed and the value will be lost, so staging once again must be considered to ensure that it is always obvious while not overshadowing the primary action.

TIMING

Timing refers to the number of frames it takes to complete an action. This becomes very important because of all the factors you have to take into account when planning for it. If you are making something move fast, you have to make sure that it’s still legible to the viewer, and if it’s a slow movement, it should hold their attention. Also, depending on the use of either fast or slow actions, you can establish moods of franticness, lethargy, energy, assuredness, excitement, nervousness, relaxation and drama.

Most importantly, timing can establish a sense of weight. A heavier object will take more time to ease into a motion and change directions, while a light object has less mass and is much more influenced by a force like wind and can change direction, stop and start much more quickly. Sometimes it is a good exercise to try to view the objects in your scene as silhouettes and try to tell from the timing if you can still get a sense of what that object is.

EXAGGERATION

Exaggeration may be one of the hardest concepts to master. Exaggeration doesn’t mean that everything should look like a Saturday morning cartoon. The concept is to find the most important ideas, emotions or concepts in the shot and enhance them until there is no doubt what is being communicated. You may want to think of this as the same technique that a caricature artist uses, finding the most identifiable parts of something and enhancing it until those few parts are the focus and everything else is just the periphery; connecting the pieces together. This can be done through not only animation, but through color usage, lighting, staging, sound design, typefaces or the shape of the objects. Some of these can be used selectively, but they should always work in harmony with each other to create the message. If one of the elements don’t fit, you will still get the feeling that something is wrong even if you aren’t able to pick out exactly what was off.

This Air Jordan commercial uses the lighting, time manipulation, sound design, and staging to enhance the drama. You can see in the altered version below that by changing the timing back to normal, balancing the color, and removing the sound, the impact is lost when you aren’t allowed to key in on the reactions of the people and focus in on Jordan’s slowed-down moves. The five scenes don’t really seem like much when the original 30 second spot is cut down to 12 seconds.

APPEAL

I like to think of this principle as the “make it look great” principle. This doesn’t mean that you need to apply realistic lens flares, have huge 3D models with fluid simulations and use the latest Trapcode and Sapphire plug-ins. You just need to make something that holds a person’s interest throughout and communicates your message. Simple, right?

Appeal should always be dependent on the audience and the message you are trying to communicate. There’s no universal rule or style that works for every project; it’s really up to the designer to be able to justify why their pitched idea is the best solution to communicate the message.

In these next examples, you will see very different approaches all conveying a message that’s interesting to watch from beginning to end.

Conclusion

All of these concepts are designed to help you better communicate your visual ideas, whether you’re an animator or designer. The tools are easy enough to learn, but the goal is understanding how to use them to deliver a message that is clear, convincing and hopefully interesting enough to take your work to the next level.

I hope that this short series of posts has been clear, informative and applicable to what you do. If you have any questions, please feel free to leave them in the comments below. Also, the Fuel Your Motionography team would love to see you putting “the principles” to practice. If you have anything you want to share with the community, we’d love to have you join our and upload your work. It’s a great way to get your work out there and receive feedback.

For anybody interested in animation, I would highly suggest finding a copy of Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston’s The Illusion of Life which this article is based on. Often referred to as the bible of animation, it is full of insight on the animation process and stories behind some of Disney’s greatest works.

REFERENCES:

Thomas, Frank and Johnston, Ollie, Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life, Abbeville Press, New York, 1981

All of the linked videos are property of their respective owners.

Jamie Peterson is a freelance graphic and motion designer running the Portland, Oregon based MelonFresh. Aside from design, Jamie’s interests include reading, , writing short fiction (Pokemon fan-fic), cooking, listening to podcasts, sketching, dreaming up bad get-rich-quick schemes, and writing bios in the third person. He also thinks that this is .