1. Principles of Animation

2. What do the principles do?
The 12 principles are mostly about 5 things:
acting the performance,
directing the performance,
representing reality through drawing,
modeling and rendering,
interpreting real world physics and
editing a sequence of actions
“make characters that move in a convincing way to communicate personality and mood”. –Dr. Lili Ann

3. Introduction to the 12 Principles of animation

4. Squash and Stretch
This tends to be the most important principle. It’s about achieving the illusion of weight and flexibility with characters and, in general, any object. The volume of the object MUST be kept the same.

5. Squash and Stretch
A ball without the volume kept the same A ball with the volume kept the same

6. Examples:
A bouncing rubber ball squashes when it hits the ground, then stretches back upon rebounding.
Facial expressions:
Squash: in a big smile not only the mouth and cheeks move, we have eyes squinting and more -- the whole face can be involved;
Stretch: yell! With the jawbone open wide, the face gets longer, looking stretched.

7. Anticipation
This is used to prepare the audience for an action, and to make the action more realistic. They are short actions performed right before main ones, like crouching a little before jumping or swinging your leg back before kicking a ball.

8. Reason for Anticipation
To get people to look at a chosen spot on the screen all that is needed is to have motion there.
If we want people to see a character grabbing a small object, that is the main action. To draw attention to it, we start with an anticipating move, like raising her hand above the object. At this point we “grabbed” attention to her, so she can go and take the object, properly witnessed by the audience.

9. Examples
A dancer does not just leap off the floor. A backwards motion occurs before the forward action is made. The backward motion is the anticipation.

10. Staging
The idea behind this is to direct the audience’s attention, and make it clear what is of greatest importance in a scene; what is happening and what is about to happen.
To stage an idea clearly, the audience's eye must be led to exactly where it needs to be at the right moment.
It is important that when staging an action, that only one idea be seen by the audience at a time

11. staging
Scene staging: do not put things in a scene just because you can or because they look cool. Each detail should have its role and help define the setting.

12. Straight Ahead Action and Pose to Pose
This has to do with the drawing process. One way is drawing out a scene frame by frame from beginning to end (straight ahead action), and the other way involves with starting to draw key frames and then filling the intervals later – also known as “in-betweening” (pose to pose).

13. Follow Through and Over-Lapping Action
When characters come to a stop or start moving or even change direction, not all of their body parts and appendages do it at the same time. Some will continue moving or lag behind for a short while. Accounting for this is vital to produce believable, lively animations.

14. Examples
Superman is flying and comes to a halt and his cape floats down coming to a rest after he has stopped.
While Superman is flying, his cape is not stuck to his body. When Superman’s body comes to a stop, the cape must also stop flowing.

15. Slow in and Out
This principle has a lot to do with acceleration and deceleration (slowing down). The bouncing ball example demonstrates this. Think of fast to slowing movement, or from slow to a faster movement

16. Slow in and Slow Out
FPS: the more frames an action takes to complete, the slower it is, naturally: at 24 fps, a hand going from open to closed in 24 frames represents 1 second of animation, while using 48 frames it takes 2 seconds to close. Thus, we can vary the pace of movement by using less or more frames for a given part of an action. Using more right after a main pose we have slow-out; right before: slow-in.

17. Arcs
Most human actions occur along an arched trajectory. This also would apply to pendulums or even a ball bouncing in a certain direction. It helps to create greater realism.

18. Secondary Actions
There are main actions: walking, talking, jumping, etc. and secondary ones that complement, enrich, or reinforce the main action. Examples: tilting and turning the head and gesturing while speaking; swinging arms while walking. True secondary actions should add to the overall impression, not steal attention from the main one.

19. Example
Imagine a squirrel, running across your lawn. The movement of the squirrel's legs (primary action) would be animated to express the light, nimble nature of his movement. The agile movement of the squirrel's tail (secondary action) would have a separate and slightly different type of movement than his legs. The squirrel's tail is an example of secondary action.

20. Timing
This is essential to the physical realm and to storytelling. It makes the objects appear to abide to the laws of physics. Often it is connected to the idea of choppiness in a scene make the story line appear incorrect, or to some mismatch in a scene that doesn’t appear like it makes sense, such as a ball bouncing unevenly.

21. Exaggeration
This technique helps to induce comedy into scenes. As Disney often did, he tried to stay close to real scenes but just presented his characters and objects in wilder and more extreme forms (If a character is sad, make him sadder; if he is bright, make him shine; mad, make him furious). It involves alterations to the characters or objects in the storyline itself.

22. Solid Drawing
The principle for this technique applies in the same way as to an animator or an academic artist. They have to understand the basics of anatomy, composition, weight, balance, light and shadow. They must take into account forms in 3D space. Knowing them can dramatically improve one’s ability to create good, strong poses and compose them with well crafted environments.

23. Non-solid vs. solid drawing

24. Appeal
Animated characters must be interesting to the audience. They don’t need to be lovely, cute, and nice, but they must be interesting, and somehow attractive. This includes objects that draw viewers’ attention.

25. Not Appealing vs. Appealing

26. Can you name all 5 principles in this animation?
The use of squash and stretch helps give this character his weight.
Follow through and overlapping action makes his belly flop under its own inertia as its movement lags behind the main action. Follow through is used for the sheriff's coat, hat and mustache.
Strong anticipation prempts the character's movement of rising to his full height while the principles of solid drawing and appeal are also evident within this richly animated sequence.

27. The 12 principles of animation
Be prepared to write a quiz on these 12 principles!! “My mom told me to never forget my principles!”

28. review