12 Orig­i­nal Prin­ci­ples — Part III

1. Appeal
2. Staging
3. Exaggeration
4. Timing
5. Anticipation
6. Ease In Ease Out
7. Secondary Motion/Action
8. Pose to Pose vs. Straight Ahead
9. Overlapping Action & Fol­low Through
10. Solid Draw­ing
11. Arcs
12. Squash & Stretch

CONTINUED — (Prin­ci­ples 7 — 12)

Sec­ondary Motion/Action - is any motion that hap­pens because of a pri­mary motion.  It is really deal­ing with speed and direc­tion and new­tons laws and relates to fol­lowthrough.  Sec­ondary action serves as a way to build com­plex­ity and helps to sup­port the main idea of the story. Think of a char­ac­ter cry­ing and a tear roles down the cheek.  The char­ac­ter did become sad because the tear rolled down the cheek.

In Frank and Ollies words, “Often, the one idea being put over in a scene can be for­ti­fied by sub­sidiary actions within the body.  A sad fig­ure wipes a tear as he turns away.  Some­one stunned shakes his head as he gets to his feet.  A flus­tered per­son puts on his glasses as he regains his com­po­sure.  When this extra busi­ness sup­ports the main action, it is called a Sec­ondary Action and is always kept sub­or­di­nate to the pri­mary action.” The pri­mary action is the emo­tion shift from happy to sad.  The tear rolling down is an aid in show­ing details of the sit­u­a­tion sit­u­a­tion and is a result of the pri­mary action.

Chuck jones explains sec­ondary motion as a way to show things that we can­not see such as grav­ity, mag­nitism, wind, ect. We can’t actu­ally see these things but we can see the effect of  forces on them.

Sec­ondary Motion

Pose to Pose vs Straight Ahead - are 2 dif­fer­ent keyfram­ing tech­niques. Each method has it’s on pros and cons. Most begin­ning ani­ma­tors tend to start the ani­ma­tion process with the straight ahead method because of it’s nat­ural feel and spon­tane­ity. The process is much like a child play­ing with a toy.  They will nat­u­rally act out sit­u­a­tions by start­ing at the begin­ning and then play­ing out the plot on through to the end of the story.  The dan­ger with this process is that ani­ma­tors can get car­ried away and keyframes too much along the way and also not pay atten­tion to tim­ing. This can result in a watery type of ani­ma­tion with even tim­ing and no real life.  Life is about change, emo­tion, and reflec­tion.  These qual­i­ties need to play well to the audi­ence and allow them to rec­og­nize sit­u­a­tion and pro­vide time for them to par­tic­i­pate.  I feel that pose to pose is a bet­ter place to start.  Pose to pose estab­lishes a frame­work of poses that com­mu­ni­cates strong moments in time.  It is also less dif­fi­cult to run over frame count and you can get feed­back from your super­vi­sor before you do to much work refin­ing some­thing that it not what the direc­tor will want. Using both tech­niques will give you both strong moments and a nat­ural spon­tine­ity with in the the animation.

Over­lap­ping Action & Fol­low Through - is all about speed and direc­tion.  Actions to not start and stop at the same time. They will blend and unfold as time goes by.  In the key fram­ing process dur­ing the 1st and 2nd passes we are estab­lish­ing whole poses and the action will not have much over­lap, fol­low through , or set­tle in.  Although hav­ing your extremes estab­lished for your set­tle in and over­shoots before you move into your 3rd pass is a good idea.  There are two ways you can estab­lish over­lap­ping actions.  You can key the over­lap as you go or you can off­set keyframes within a tim­ing edi­tor such as the dope sheet and or graph edi­tor.  Fol­low through is all about physics.

New­tons Laws state:

• 1st Law — Objects in motion tend to stay in motion in a straight con­tin­u­ous line for­ever unless a force is act­ing upon it.  And, objects at rest tend to stay at rest.
• 2nd Law — Force = Mass * Accel­er­a­tion — An inversely pro­por­tional rela­tion­ship exist between mass and accel­er­a­tion.  Exam­ple: A MAC truck pos­sesses a huge amount of mass there­fore is would take a large amount of forces to accel­er­ate it.  Trans­versely, a small object such as a 50 cal­iber bul­let con­tain­ing a much smaller mass can still gen­er­ate a lot of force if it is accel­er­ated to 3044 feet per second.
• 3rd Law — For every action there is an equal but oppo­site reac­tion.  Forces are trans­fered from one object to another.  Objects of sim­i­lar mass and poten­tial energy can be give back equal force and can­cel out. How­ever, the greater force always wins out.

Hula Skirt Fol­low Through & Over­lap­ping Action

Solid Draw­ing - in 3D is about clar­ity and intent.  Tra­di­tion­ally solid draw­ing deals with con­sis­tency in line, vol­ume, and per­spec­tive.  An ani­ma­tor would ask, “Is this ani­ma­tion drawn solidly and con­sis­tently?”.  Even though we are not draw­ing all the nec­es­sary frames in 3D we do have to  pose the char­ac­ter to com­mu­ni­cate the story over time.  We still must think about the over­all refine­ment and qual­ity of our work.  There­fore, solid draw­ing in 3D is con­cerned with the over­all qual­ity of ani­ma­tion and the con­sis­tency of clar­ity and intent!

Arcs - are all about cre­at­ing Organic & Nat­ural motions. With­out arcs actions can feel stiff and lin­ear.  On occa­sion arcs are not needed such as with hard actions that illus­trate great force or mechan­i­cal style move­ments.  Move­ments with arcs will give a nat­ural flow and can even add weight to a char­ac­ters actions!

Mushu comes to life — Arcs

Squash & Stretch - is all about cre­at­ing a sense of visual weight.  When a force is applied to a vol­ume the sur­face will tend to nat­u­rally dis­place. The force gen­er­ally trav­els along the path of least resis­tance.  In addi­tion to char­ac­ters that deform. Every day objects such as Lis­ter­ine Bot­tles, Hershey’s Kisses, Chevron Cars, Reach Tooth Brushes, etc all have been ani­mated with squash & stretch in order for them to feel more organic and alive.  On the tech­ni­cal side, ani­ma­tion soft­ware uses a carte­sian coor­di­nate sys­tem uti­liz­ing  X, Y, & Z val­ues rep­re­sent­ing Trans­la­tion, Rota­tion, or Scale.

If Y decreases then X & Z will increase in order to main­tain a vol­ume.  What hap­pens when you have a char­ac­ter that can­not be deformed like Buzz Light Year?  How would we be able to cre­ate visual weight in the char­ac­ter?  We can squash & stretch the pose. I use two ani­ma­tion clips Goofy Learns to Swim and a Buzz LightYear ani­ma­tion test cre­ated by Cameron Miyasaki.

Goofy Learns to Swim

Buzz Lightyear Ani­ma­tion Test

Ulti­mately, there are 4 dif­fer­ent ways to cre­ate squash & stretch with a character.

1. Direct Manip­u­la­tion of indi­vid­ual scale val­ues
2. Expres­sions Dri­ven Scale — Inverse Pro­por­tion.
3. Use of a Deformer
4. Change in Pose

12 Prin­ci­ples of Ani­ma­tion — Part I / Part II / Part IV