So you've learned the 12 principles of animation but don't know where to actually apply them? Fear not!! For here is my step-by-step process, very very condensed, into one singular giant GIF.
Hope it helps!
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1. Ah Fai was a chief animator for McDull’s animated features. He’s super cool. Ultimate senpai.
2. Previous post on breakdowns right here
Some thoughts on acceleration and force
I presented this in the order of how I slowly understood the trick of delivering force - first an abstract concept of impact taught by Ah Fai, then a more complicated discovery on the acceleration pattern, last back to a more abstract concept of breakdowns.
Like I’ve previously stressed, 2D animation is everything but one single approach. There’s no one rule that rules them all, but interchangeable ideas with math, or physics, or music, etc. There’s no “perfect” animation either, but what is perceived as organic and dynamic. E.g., using the Fibonacci numbers to animate didn’t bring me a perfect animation! On the other hand, a tiny change in the pattern could already make the feeling of force so much more powerful.
Not so much of a tutorial than a personal experience. I hope you find this interesting hahaha
I have to draw a lot of gold and metal for my work, but wasn't happy with any of the metal tutorials i could find around. I prefer really specific instruction, so after some research i put together what i think works as a generalist's guide/tutorial. Not perfectly accurate, but i hope it's helpful!
I asked my instagram's folllower to give me ideas for making small animation. My rule was : no more than 10 or 12 frames/imagesper animation. Here the second batch
Animated on my Nintendo 2DS; memory limit of 100 drawings.
Tried a different clean-up line style, like a brush pen, inspired by a few French animated films. (Did the clean-up animation while on vacation in France. Thank you Justine and Louaye for helping with the vocals!)
How difficult was Miguel to animate? I read somewhere that he is 6’9 and over 300 pounds haha what a beast. Were there any specific things to take note of when it came to animating him? It’s insane how through his movements he just exudes power and strength. Even the way he walks just makes him seem like a guy not to messed with. Did his frame hinder anything in animation that would not occur on the smaller models?
miguel was SUPER FUN i loved animating him!! i feel like a lot of 3D animation defaults to super skinny characters that are basically just tubes, so it's fun to work with a character that lets you design the shapes into something more graphic
we had to think a lot about how someone that big moved, but also how they carry themselves when just standing and talking. we referenced idris elba:
when a person has very well defined and built up chest muscles, their shoulders tend to be pulled forward. i did some posture tests early on to help out with finding a good slumped but still powerful, natural standing pose
a lot of tweaking had to be done too whenever he was doing any kind of dynamic action because of how defined his muscles are, extreme poses tended to get off model pretty quickly. here's an example with one of the shots that i animated, i tried to recreate what his model looked like without any shaping adjustments:
i wanna give a special shout out to eric de carolis, who animated a lot of fantastic miguel swagger, he really helped set the bar for how we should handle miguel's massive everything when walking. he animated this shot:
so, yes! there was a lot that went into finding his character through movement and it's always a challenge to animate subtleties on someone this big while still making them feel heavy
From Scrat Tales, when we went into Scrat 's head, it was all 2D. We tried to do it in the art style of one of Blue Sky studios's OG artists, Bill Frake, who designed and storyboarded on the original Ice Age movie.
Happy #AniMonday ! Between BlueSky and Bento, I did a little EARLY early dev work for Elemental . My talented sister provided the voice for this pencil test . She's got the firey personality for Ember, yeah?
Happy #AniMonday ! Another Spies in Disguise pencil test for you. My mission was to play around with how the pigeon characters moved around as a flock. I was told this was the test that got me info #blueskystudios . Nyahaha!