Animation 101 is for you!

Animation 101 is the core beginning of our program! We get right to it, by learning the principles of animation as you animate!  You should get the book by  Preston Blair and read it all the way through! You should also take some drawing classes to prepare you for your journey into animation!

Here is what we cover:

1. Squash and stretch – give weight and volume to your characters as they move
2. Anticipation – let the audience know about a major action that is going to happen
3. Staging – express the clear intention of your characters through every pose or action
4. Straight ahead action and pose to pose – choose one of the techniques of creating animation: draw the key poses then add the transitional ones, or create every single scene one after another
5. Follow through and overlapping action – pay attention to the movements of the characters, as some parts move faster than the others and when the character stops, some of the body parts still keep moving.
6. Slow in and slow out – to make the actions more realistic, draw more frames at the beginning and at the end of the action and fewer frames in the middle.
7. Arc – add slightly circular motions to the actions of the characters
8. Secondary action – to emphasize the main action, use secondary actions that add more liveliness to it
9. Timing – adjust the timing of the scenes by making them slower or faster
10. Exaggeration – using exaggerations in movements also helps to emphasize some points and ideas
11. Solid drawing – even though the characters are drawn in two-dimensional space, they must look like their forms have some weight
12. Appeal – make sure to create appealing characters, so that the audience will be interested in watching them

Let’s get started and make balls bounce, chickens fly and fish swim! Whoo hoo!