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.