In the early days hand drawn animation a group of Disney animators came together and defined 12 rules of animation that when applied properly could create amazing animation and engaging experience for the audience.
In 1981 Disney animators, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston released a book titled ‘The illusion of life Disney Animation’ detailed all 12 principles.Since then animators form around the world have studied and applied these techniques. Although lots of them are hand drawn animators,but in nowadays,the 12 principles are still useful. whenever you set a keyframe in any application,the 3D animators should also think about the 12 rules of animation.
- 1.Squash and stretch : So,the first things I wanna talk about is what can ‘squash and stretch’ do for our animations,especially in 3D animations.For example,a bouncing beech ball or other some soft balls,how to make the ball feel more flexible and less rigid and ‘squash and stretch’ can solve that question perfectly.Just add key frames and squeeze in the collision with objects, and you will get a excellent sense of weight and quality.Of course, the same applies to expressions, characters, any physical changes.
- 2.Anticipation:It seems like anticipation is the oldest devices that has been used in animation.Anticipation is basically kind of a movement that you want to employ before the main action. Its function is to prepare the audience so that the next action of your character will not be so abrupt it’s exactly crucial in all animations.
- 3.Staging:Staging is that we should pay attention to the protagonist and tell the story. The principle of staging originated from the early theater, which means to accurately and clearly convey the concept to the audience(The story point is the most important thing).In another way, staging uses cameras, scenes and characters to attract the audience, giving people a very amazing feeling, rather than showing everything in front of the audience.It’s more like controlling the whole. For animators, how to show your story and firmly grasp the eyes of the audience has always been a very important thing.
- 4.Straight ahead and pose to pose:In fact, these are two completely different techniques,straight ahead is one action, one painting, frame by frame painting, linear process.pose to pose requires more planning and more thinking.Lay out all your main poses.Draw the key pose first, and then fill in the middle, which will make your animation more clear.In my opinion, this pose to pose production process can save more time and energy, and can set a big framework for your animations before production, and the idea will be clearer.
- 5.Follow-through and overlap: In the real world, humans, animals and insects stop a certain action, they will not stop immediately, but will be accompanied by associated actions.For example, our secondary organs will follow the movement of the primary organs, even if the primary organs have stopped moving.Overlap is the offset of key frames at different stages of each part’s motion, which is what we call the delay effect.
- 6.Slow-in,slow-out:Slow in and slow out is to slow down the entry and stop time in a uniform linear action, so that the beginning and end of the animation are not so abrupt. It is often achieved by adding frames.
- 7.Arcs:Using the arc rules will make the animations smoother and fluent.Think about the motion of an object. It’s basically a circular track. No matter what kind of creature it is, its motion has radians,it can bring more life to your animation in this way.
- 8.Secondary action:The secondary action is different from the following action.Follow-through means that the part continues to move with the stop of the whole movement,The secondary action is more like a support for the main action. For example, when a person walks on the street, there must be an expression on his face, and this expression is his secondary action.
- 9.Timing and Spacing:This is one of the twelve rules of animation formulated by early Disney animators.Painting and movement can determine time and rhythm.In practice, the more frames, the slower the rhythm, and the less frames, the faster the rhythm.
- 10.Exaggeration:Exaggeration is the display of physical characteristics, and the audience will feel very credible. It is mainly to enlarge the body movements to reflect more exaggerated emotions.This technology is very useful for cartoon animation.
- 11.Solid drawing:Solid drawing doesn’t seem very practical in the current 3D animation production, but in the early traditional 2D animation, a solid foundation means that your picture will have more depth, balance and three-dimensional sense. This can also be used in today’s three-dimensional animation. Having solid drawing skills means that you have stronger picture control and aesthetics.So animators still need to work hard on basic skills even the 3D animators.
- 12.Appeal:This rule is very important. It can be said that only when you master the appeal can you really step into the door of animation.Because it contains all the design of characters, exaggeration, acme, emotion and environment complement each other, your animation needs to constantly improve the quality to make your characters stand out and impressive in the eyes of the audience.
After summarizing and understanding the 12 principles of animation, I feel that I have learned about animation again, with the wisdom of those early animators. Maybe some rules are not so applicable to the current commercial animation mode, but every time you review the 12 principles, you can always get new things you want from the wisdom of the former people.