Giving life to your imagination

Over the last few weeks, I have started learning about animation – giving life to the objects in the scene. There are a lot of things that I need to learn about animation, so the things I create actually look realistic, and I am giving it my best.

At first I learned about the basics of animation, which at the time, seemed quite tidious and not very interesting. But after working some more with animation and learning more about the subject, I can see how these basics prinsiples are important when animating.

I started with the bouncing ball exercise, which at first glance might look very simple and something to just breeze through – but that is not the case. The basic principles learned in this exercise are relevant to everything you animate.

When studying references and playing around with the ball I realized how the simplest things can build upon the realism of the animation, and if I remove one of these simple things – the whole thing looks fake. An example of this is the stretch & squeeze. This happens to all  objects, although it might not be as visible on everything – however this does not apply to hard objects like a frying pan etc.

Another good example of basic principles is movement, does the object ease in and out of a movement? Or does it move in a linear fashion? For instance a ball bouncing on the floor, it hits the floor in a linear fashion, it doesn’t slow down, but when it is at its highest, it slow down before reaching the top and eases into the falling curve.