The Principles of Animation.
Squash and Stretch
This is one of the most important techniques in the animation process. The purpose of this technique is to give a sense of flexibility and weight to the objects being animated. This technique can be applied to simple objects such as a bouncy ball or to complex items such as facial expressions.
Anticipation
This technique is used to prepare the audience for action in the film. This makes the action seem more realistic. An example of this would be a tennis player preparing to hit the tennis ball and hitting the tennis ball. This technique is not only used in physical actions, it's used also in many less physical items such as a character looking off the screen to see somebody arriving or to focus attention on an object which will become part of the action.
Staging
This technique is similar to staging as we know it in film and theatre. The prupose of this effect is to direct the audiences attention and to make it clear what the superlative is of the scene, what is happening in the current scene and what is about to happen in that scene or in further scenes. This technique can be put in to action through various ways such as where the character has been placed, the use of light and shadow and the camera angles. The objective of this technique is keeping focus on what is relevant and to avoid any unnecessary detail. Examples of this 'type' of technique is what we often see on the news but in a slightly different essence where the bacjgrounds of a still frame is blurred out so that a person or object becomes the most noticable on screen.
Straight ahead action and pose to pose
Straight ahead action means to draw out a scene frame by frame from beginning to end, I had experience of this in drawing a flip book and it is a long process especially if this was used in creation of a childrens cartoon. It can also be very easily misconstrued such as forgetting bits of a scene.
Pose to pose involves drawing out a few major frames and filling in the intervals later on. This may be drawing a fish tank with a moving plant as that could consist of only around ten frames, you could then add the fish later on with a new layer to the film.
Straight ahead action creates more fluid dynamic action of illusion in making your eyes feel this is a very natural production . The negative points to this technique is it can be very hard to maintain proportion and creating the exact poses frame to frame.
Pose to pose is better when using dramatic or emotional scenes in which composition and relation to surroundings are of a greater importance to a production. A lot of the time a combination if these two techniques are often used to create a production but with the advancement of computer animation these techniques can often be used slightly differently as computers can allow you to maintain the aspect ratio whilst keeping seperate frames and then combining these on seperate layers displaying the end product of an animation.
Follow through and overlapping action
These two techniques are very closely related. They both help in the process of rendering movement of objects and helping to create a more realistic look to the objects on frame; giving the impression that characters are being applied to the laws of physics.
Follow through refers to seperate parts of the body continuing to move after the moving character has stopped such as a character walking down the street, stopping and putting ones hand to ones chin in order to think whilst the legs still remain static.
Overlapping action is how the tendency of parts of the body can move at different rates, we could imagine this technique being used in a scene where a character is running and the characters head turns right to look at the other side of a running track, the head would move at a different pace to the legs as if it was moving as fast as the legs either the character would be moving very slowly or the head should move at this different pace on order to show emotion on the face and not make this look like a production error.
A third technique is known as 'drag' where a character begins to move and parts of the character takes a few frames to catch up with the character. An example of this could be Marge Simpson, famous for huge hair out of 'The Simpsons' is running and then sharply stops, if she is applied to the laws of physics her hair will be slightly behind her head whilst running and presumably would fall forwards or to its natural position after the sharp stop so we can see the force of this 'drag' through the hair, this could be a small thing to consider when animating but the end result in registering this technique in the viewers head wouold be huge. Body parts with much tissue like large stomachs, breasts or loose skin on a dog would be much more prone to force than the torso of the dog which is more static as it has more bones.
An example of the moving hold would be in 'Thomas and Johnston' where the character is rendered absoloutely still and this is often used in drawing attention to the main character. Thomas and Johnston said that this gave a dull and lifeless effect on a character but this could produce a powerful emotional scene on how one was to use camera angles and lighting in a scene.
Slow in and slow out
Movement of the human and many other objects need time to accellerate and slow down.
Source:- http://www.wikipedia.org/
