Basics of Animation

What is Animation?

Animation is the process of creating a scene through the rapid display of pictures and motions. When we hear the word animation, we think about cartoon-like Doraemon, shin-chan etc. So in earlier times, animation was done by the continuous movement of the pictures of characters and scenes using hand-like puppets. Nowadays, with the help of many tools, it is possible to create the characters and scenes in 2D or 3D and make the animation.

There are a lot of tools created by the developers to make the animation, like Blenders3D, Maya, etc. Animation can be of various types like 2D animation, 3D animation, paper animation, traditional animation, puppet animation, etc.

There are some topics that the term "animation" covers in today's society, which is full of creativity and visualizations. Everyone immediately conjures up images of cartoons and various Disney World shows when they hear this word. Children love animated films like Disney World, Doraemon, etc. All cartoons and animated images are a sort of animation created by combining thousands of individual images and playing them out in a predetermined order.

When we think back a few decades, all animation was produced by hand or by painting, and certain puppet-like structures were made to display the animation. These types of animation, however, are real-world animations, while in that technological era, digital animation will advance.

There are numerous animation styles that we may observe on TV, as well as numerous productions and images that mostly diverge from actual productions and films.

Principles of Animation

Ollie Johntson and Frank Thomas gave 12 basic principles of animation in 1981.These principles are applicable to all types of animations, including computer animation also.

Following is the list of these principles of animation:

1. Squash and Strech

This is the most important principle among all of the twelve principles. This describes the importance and understanding of the weight and volume of drawing any object or character.

2. Anticipation

This is the situation where the animator will try to create some scenes, and the audience will wait for something happening, but nothing will happen.

3. Staging

Staging should be perfect in any animation. Staging means the animator should create such types of scenes and characters that the audience is attracted to these scenes. This makes a complete animation more interesting, and the audience does not lose their interest.

4. Straight Ahead

This principle describes that all the scenes should be drawn first from the beginning to the ending, the animator should fill the interval scene.

5. Flow Through and Overlapping Action

This principle describes about the different speeds of two or more objects in the same scene.

6. Slow In and Slow Out

This principle describes those characters and objects whose more importance is in the between scenes, and they are slow or negligible in the beginning and ending.

7. Arc

In animation, each and every object will follow some arc. There should not be any object which will follow a straight line. If we want to make animation more attractive, then the arc should be curved and elegant, and smooth so the audience will enjoy it more.

8. Secondary Action

This principle describes that one character will have some action, and based on those actions second character will have actions and move in more than one direction. Other character's actions will be called the supportive action to the main action, which are small actions to make animation more realistic.

9. Timing

This principle defines that if we want to perform each action perfectly, then the timing should be correct. This principle takes a lot of years of hard work to get a better output.

10. Exaggeration

By proper animation style, we can create more realistic scenes to connect the audience more towards reality, and instead of showing the object in a straightforward manner, the animator should introduce it in a more extreme way.

11. Solid Drawing

To have a more realistic scene, the drawing should be solid and perfect for each object or character. So this principle describes that if we create each character in a 3D shape, then the whole animation will look more realistic.

12. Appeal

This principle describes that any character animator creates should not be an exact copy of a real person. The character should have similarities to the real-world person so that the audience can think about the person.