Appeal

Appeal is a visual quality that gives an animated creation another demension of realism and attracts the viewer's eyes, making them watch. Just like in a live action performance, an animated character or prop must be "attractive" and able to pass off as "real" to the audenice. What I mean by "real" is real for the animated world it inhabits. For that, the world its in has to appear real, and for that to happen that world has to be appealling to the viewer. If that world is attractive and appealing, the viewer can engage with it, and through that, the animated world seems real to the viewer.
How that is achived by individual artists and animators is what gives the animations they make their individual appeal to certian audenices, for example animations made for young children feature bright colours and cute-looking-child-like characters.

Another way of saying this is to describe appeal is to call it a character's "X-factor". If a character has got the "x-factor" then the audenice will watch the show.

secondary action

To make a primary action of character more life-like, support it by adding secondary actions to the character. These are actions that are usually unnoticable, but without them, the action doesn't look convincing.

For example, when a character is walking, he or she is usually also swinging their arms and doing a facial expression or something verbal (like talking or whistling).

The point of such actions is to empihize the main action that the character is doing. If a secondary action conflicts or becomes more interesting than the main action, then the animation fails.

Facial expressions are generally considered secondary actions, so its best to show changes in expression when a character is stationary or before or after a character moves (not during the movement, otherwise the viewer won't notice the change).

Exaggeration

Tracing an action from live action frame by frame can produce accurate results, but it can make an action appear unnatural in drawn form. Sometimes, an animator has to exaggerate things to make an action look more natural. The degrees of exaggeration mainly depends on the artist's style or taste (does he/she want the animation to be as realistic as possible?).

Exaggeration can be used to empihize an action or an expression, for example, when a character reacts to something.

This is a link to a 1919 Ko-Ko the Clown film "The Tantalizing Fly". In this film, the character was mostly rotoscoped (traced from a live-action film).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-K67eHDKpc&feature=related

This is a link to a later KoKo the Clown film which wasn't rotoscoped (exaggeration was used widely).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlaTYay-vx0&feature=related

Arcs

In nature, objects tend to move in arcs or some form of circular motion.

Its well observed when an object is thrown in the air and falls to the ground. The force of the throw makes the object travel forward, while gravity pulls it down to the ground, making it follow an arc.

The only exception to this is when an heavy object is dropped. It hits the ground in a stright path.

In living organisms, body parts; such as arms, legs, eyes, heads, tails, etc; operate in circular motions.
The drawing below demostrates this fact in the human arm.

Only mechanical devices operate in stright lines.

Slow In and Slow Out

In reallife, a moving object doesn't instantly move from stationary or stop instantly after travelling at speed. For a stationary object to move, a force is required to overcome the force of friction and gravity that is holding it stationary, and that takes a bit of time. To stop a moving object, a force must act against it opposite the direction its going, like stationary object object or friction, and that also takes a bit of time.

For example, a car doesn't go 0-60 in a instant, it takes a bit of time to build up momentum to reach high speed. This is easily seen in the following video of a drag race.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xdxo8zmVak0

Here's a simple Flash animation showing this principle.

In the screen shot below, you'll see that in the inital frames of the movie, the sucessive images of the car are very close together, simulating the inital build up of momentum. In the later frames, the sucessive images of the car are far apart, simulating the burst of speed.

The principle is also applied to objects slowing down to a stop. Here's a Flash animation of a car stopping naturally.

As seen in the screenshot below, the sucessive images of the car get closer together near the end of the moive, creating the illusion of slowing down.

Sometimes, this principle is ignored for comedic effect. The most famous example of this is when Road Runner stops instantly.

Pose-to-Pose Action

In this techinque of aniamting motion, a few "keyframes" are drawn and composed first then the frames inbetween are drawn to fit in the sequence.

The techinque is very easy to implement on a computer in animation applications. The following animation of a moving square was created in Flash.

In the screen shot below, all the frames of the animation are onionskinned to show the square's position on each previous frame. The keyframes are marked with a black dot on the timelime.

In computer animation, a "tween" can be applied to automatically fill in the frames inbetween the keyframes. This was the case for the moving square.

This techinque of animation is useful in creating dramatic or emotional scenes where the staging and timing of motion is important.

However, true artistic expression is limited to the keyframes and the techinque can result in "robotic" style movement.

Stright Ahead Action

In this techinque of animation, the action is drawn by the artist frame by frame.

In this Flash animation, the square is moving in a awkward way. This kind of motion can only be achived through the stright ahead action method.

In the screen shot below, all the frames were keyframed. they are onionskinned here, showing in detail the square's motion in the video above.

As demostrated by the animation, stright ahead animation allows artistic creation on how a character or object moves, which can result in more natural and fluid-like motion. Its ideal for fast or wild actions scenes.

However, this techinque is very labour intensive and hard to keep the animated object or character in porotion in each sucessive frame drawn (which is evindant in the flipbook animations which were posted back in feburary). Its hard to stage and time, as you can't tell exactly how many frames an action takes to happen.

Follow through and Overlapping

When a character moves, not all body parts move at the same rate. When a character starts moving from a stationary position parts of the character's body, such as the arms and head stay in stationary position for a few frames when the starts to move. The same thing happens when a character stops moving or changes direction. This effect creates an illusion that a character is obeying the laws of physics.

Here's an example I drawn of a man skidding on a wet floor to a ticket booth.

In this example, the character has skid to a stop, but parts of his body continue to move in the same direction as the character was moving before. If this was animated, this continulation of motion would last only a few frames.

An extreme example of this effect can be observed in fight scenes were a character gets knocked out or flune at a distance.

When a character moves, clothing and hair are dragged about. Sometimes this is animated in certian ways for dynamic purposes, demostrated in the anime-styled character below.

Fat or flabby tissue is also subject to this principle.

Staging

Like in live action performances, how a scene is staged in animation is important. Many of the rules of staging characters on stage or screen (such as good guys entering the scene from the left, villians on the right) also apply to animation. The concepts of close-ups, long shots and medium shots apply also to animation.

When planning an animation, its a good idea to plan it like a live-action film. Don't overload it with lots of action, it'll confuse the viewer (unless you want to).

Anticipation

When most actions occur, some form of anticipation is performed before the action happens. For example, when a character is about to jump, the character bends downwards (like a spring is pressed down to store energy before its made to jump) before conmensing the jump.

Anohter example is when a character is throwing something or hitting something with a bat, the character's arm bends back before the bat or object is swung forward.

Timing

Timing is an important consideration in animation. They are two forms of timing to consider in making an animation - physical timing and theatrical timing.

Physical timing is the timing of motions for the purposes of making a scene realistic. For example, when a character is trying to move an object, the object's weight determines how long it takes to move from a still start. If its an heavy object, it'll take a long bit of time to start moving, while if it was a light object, it'll take almost no time at all.

Here's a simple animation of a man pushing a large box demostrating the use of physical timing.

Another example is the timing of sound sources, such as a character's mouth, parallel to a soundtrack.

Theatrical timing is the timing of things for dramatic purposes. For example, the character's entry to a scene can be slow to produce tenson or mystery or fast to suprise the viewer or to make a character appear normal or average or not interesting.

Squash and Stretch

The Squash and Stretch principle is the techinque of squashing and stretching animated objects in motion to enhance the illusion that an animated object has weight and flexibility.

The most well known demostration of this techinque is the bouncing ball (the example drawn below is not that good (I admit)).

The effect is well observed in real life when you look at objects colliding or been dropped and on to a surface.

The folowing link is to a high speed video clip of a golf ball been hit by the club, clearly showing the squash and stretch principle in the real world.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Y57pw_iWlk&NR=1

In this drawing of a paino hitting the ground, the squash and stretch principle is applied (notice the bending of some parts of the piano).

The principle can also be applied to the muscles of moving limbs. In living organisms, arms and legs are moved by a pairs of muscles. When an arm or leg bends, one muscle contracts (squashing) while the other relaxes (stretches).

One Minute Movie - Back to the Future

Its not complete let, but here's what has been done so far.

This is the clocktower scene made by me (the first ever animation I have ever made with ToonBoom)

Here's the scene Marty returns to 1985, finding the Doc alive (thanks to him).

Here's is the scene where the Doc drops Marty off home and leaves for the future

Here is an animation of the final exit scene of our one minute version of the movie by Andrew Fleming (with a little help from me).

Newton's laws of motion

Newton's first law in action

Newton's second law in action

Newton's third law in action

first sketches of Animan and Realman

sketch - plot idea

Animan - plot ideas

Realman builds an underground lyre underneath New York and digs under the offices of Marvel Comics to make the building fall down to his lyre, holding the staff inside hostage.

Its simular to what happened in an episode of Transformers.

Realman plans to blow up a newly-built hydroelectric dam to flood Silicon Valley (to stop the production of processors for game-playing computers).

Its a simular plot to an episode of The Simpsons but Realman takes conselation that the Silicon Valley flooding idea is like the plot in a James Bond movie.

Animan's arch enemy - Realman

Realman is a posh artisian man in his 40s or 50s who hates cartoons. He never even saw a Disney film as a child. He doesn't like escapism. He is destracted easily.
He works as a history teacher in Animan's school.

By living near sellafield nuclear plant, he developed special powers (to his annoyance). He vowels to do whatever possible to end the making or distrbution of cartoons and comics.

He's good with disguises. Wears black and a balaclavar when doing warning messages (by video).

He gets ticked off when someone points out that what he's doing is simular to what happened in a cartoon.

Animan ideas

Animan is a shy high school student (aged between 14-16) who has a big imagination and a huge interest in cartoons and comics. He hates the real world and its problems.
By night, he writes fan fiction. One night, while online, lightning struck him and gave him the ability to imitate the actions of any cartoon character he can think of.

Normally, he wears his school uniform, but as "Animan" he tries to dress up as the characters he thinks off.

His biggest weakness is anything feminine.

flipbook firsts

I just made a few animations online. Click the links

sun rising quickly
http://www.benettonplay.com/toys/flipbookdeluxe/player.php?id=256209

sail boat
http://www.benettonplay.com/toys/flipbookdeluxe/player.php?id=256202

Piano falling
http://www.benettonplay.com/toys/flipbookdeluxe/player.php?id=256191

feather falling
http://www.benettonplay.com/toys/flipbookdeluxe/player.php?id=256183

first ever blog

This is my first ever blog. Its not much, but its a start.