level 5 - 12 Principles of Animation
- Jan 26
- 3 min read
Updated: Feb 24
(Week 1)
Entering the module, I knew I would be doing animation practice with the 12 Principles of Animation (Pose-to-Pose/Straight Ahead, Solid Drawing, Arc, Staging, Anticipation, Slow In/Out, Follow Through/Overlapping, Secondary Action, Timing and Appeal.), so as I was being informed on how we'll be progressing through the module, I first assembled a list of three original characters I created. These characters were chosen because they represent different styles and skills I have; Beck is cartoony and cute, MoonShine is surreal and abstract and lastly, A is drawn with realism and proportional accuracy.
or our first task, we were all instructed to join in groups of twos and take turns learning how to make two objects- a wire animation puppet and a makeshift stand for our phone cameras. Afterwards, we would teach eachother how to build them ourselves using materials provided to us. I had the pleasure of teaching Fabio how to make a puppet, whilst he taught me how to make the phone stand.
After creating our objects, it was time to animate our faceless model acting surprised using three principles of animation: Squash and stretch, Exaggeration, then Timing. When animating Alan (That's what I named my puppet), I wanted to establish more build-up and anticipation, so I made them look-around before turning around fully to the camera, jumping backwards and falling in shock.
Our next step was to make another animation with the puppet, but this time with drawings of faces that can be stuck on the puppet with blu-tac and swapped with one another between shots. For this animation, I wanted to focus my attention on the reaction after the surprised reaction, so I made them stumble backwards into their original pose to make it loop!
Homework - (Surprise Linetest)
For homework, I was tasked sith animating a surprised face on-paper as an introductory to on-paper animation. Rather than animating only a face or simple design, I went the extra two miles by animating my original character, MoonShine- A character made of separate, floating parts connected to an accordion body, reacting with surprise.
I originally wanted to animate the accordion stretching and bumping against MoonShine's head, causing their face to spin like a seesaw, but as I continued working, I ended up adding more and more moving elements to the linetest. MoonShine's arm would fall, but I made her arm spin around, then I made the planets on his arm clack against eachother like pool-balls and drift from orbit.
It took two weeks to finish the animation from draft to clean-up and despite the fast speed, I'm really proud of it! My biggest takeaway from this experiment would be to practice with the timing and speed of my animation. Cramming all of this detail into only a second of animation will look fast, but I think I still could have paced it better by drawing just a few more frames.
Week 2
The next task was to create a simple animation of a head and body turning from one right to left. Much like my previous homework, I wanted to go the extra mile and use one of my oroginal characters for the experiment. For this one, I used my character; Soupé, primarily because they have a much simpler design and I want to practice animating them for my upcoming animation project she will be starring in!
I tried to incorporate gravity and weight into Soupé's movement, it can be seen best in how the tip of her beret and scarf flow behind her movement. I perdonally think the sense of flow is better in the rough animation seen below because of how sporadic the linework is, so it would leave more to the imagination to make sense of the pace.
Week 3
Water animation goes here
Week 4
Weight lift animation
Week 5
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