What is animation

[Nommalorel]

Slowly the subject will be filled in.

What is animation

Animation is when 2 or more pictures are shown in rapid succession to create the illusion of movement. Many still pictures, when properly adjusted, appear as if they are moving. This is also called animation. The speed at which these consecutive pictures are played is called FPS Frame Per Second, or frames per second. For example, 24 FPS means that 24 pictures/frames are shown one after the other in each second of the animation in question. The higher the FPS, the more pictures you need to draw to show one second of movement.

The most important thing to know before explaining animation production is that a good drawing knowledge is necessary to be able to make animation. If the person wants, he can work both drawing and animation together, but he should never work on animation alone. I say this as someone who learned animation using stickman programs and then entered the industry without knowing drawing and tried to learn drawing while working on the one hand. Either drawing should be studied first or both should be studied together. Animation cannot be studied alone.

How to Make Animation?

To make animation, it is necessary to know the basic principles of animation that apply to all types of animation. One of the best resources written for this is Animator's survival kit by Richard Williams. You can also refer to Alan Becker's 12 principles of animation video as a video source. Under this title, we will still try to explain all animation principles. I think it would be appropriate to start with spacing.

Spacing

Spacing means interval/distance in Turkish and is used for the distance between two square drawings. The greater the distance difference between the 2 frames, the greater the speed seen. And vice versa, the shorter the distance, the lower the speed seen.




Timing

Timing is usually explained together with spacing and since I believe that spacing is more important than timing, I will explain timing as a subcategory or continuation of spacing. Timing indicates how many frames are between each beat. For example, in each bounce of a bouncing ball, we specify the time between each bounce and the time it touches the ground as timing. It's often useful to think of timing like musical rhythms. Remember that each beat itself is also timing.



Easing

We have already said that spacing is the distance between 2 frames and that when this distance increases, the speed increases and when the distance decreases, the speed slows down. But can you imagine what happens when we put 2 or 3 spacing in a row with equal distances, decreasing distances and increasing distances?

When equally spaced spacings are added one after the other:



The object is moving at equal speed.

When spacings with decreasing distance are added consecutively:


The object slows down over time and stops. This is called ease in.

When spacings with increasing distance are added one after the other:



The object moves faster and faster over time. This is called ease out.


Arc

Arc is arc in Turkish. It is called the movement paths in which objects move by drawing an arc. In life, objects do not only move on a single line. Many times they seem to move on paths that bend.



Can you see what kind of path the ball follows?



If this ball traveled to its destinations following straight paths, it would not look realistic or believable. Because in real life, balls don't move this way, and when we look at an animation, we expect the object we see to move in a way that resembles the real thing.



Do you realize how wrong it looks?



Because we expect the ball's trajectory to bend with gravity, a straight trajectory makes the animation look very strange. That's why arcs are important and almost all movements have arcs.

Squash and stretch

This technique is used to simulate motion blur in cameras or to provide information about the material of the animated object. Simply, the animated object is stretched on the axis of the direction of motion while being compressed by the other axis. Generally, squash and stretch is applied to objects such as water balloons, while it is avoided for objects such as bowling balls. Nevertheless, it may be appropriate to apply it according to the situation. Each technique described here can be applied in different ways other than its standard use.



Look at how much the ball creeps when its speed increases and how much it recovers when its speed decreases.



Another thing to be aware of is to try not to lose the volume of the object when applying squash and stretch. If an object stretches on one axis, it should stretch on the other. This is an important point.

Since we're talking about animation, we should also look at ways in which this principle is applied more often in anime. And that is motion blur.

Straight ahead and Pose to pose

These terms are two basic ways of doing animation. But they are not the only ways. Nor are they only used in isolation from each other.

Straight ahead

Starting an animation from the first frame and proceeding without successive planning is called straight ahead. The advantage of this technique is that it makes the animation feel more natural and organic because it is done with more feeling, and it causes more interesting animations to be created thanks to the different ideas that come to mind while animating. On the downside, there are problems such as not being able to create the desired scene in a planned animation, the size of the characters constantly changing, and not being able to predict how the animation will eventually look from the beginning.



Look how fluid, organic and dynamic the animation looks. But if you pay attention, you can see that the character jumps too far and its size is constantly changing.

Pose to Pose

It is an animation method in which the first and last frame of an animation or movement is drawn first, and then those two main frames are filled with intermediate frames. This improves the consistency of the animation, and it is much easier to make a change at the beginning of the animation. However, the naturalness of the movement can be less natural, and too much planning can detract a little from the spirit of the animation.




Notice how predictable and planned the animation looks. But it feels too robotic.

Both of these methods are useful and important. These two methods can even be used together.

Secondary action

Secondary action is the extra movement that we add to the main action that we want to do and show. These actions are put in to strengthen the main action and are one of the most used principles in anime. Of course, it has a slightly different usage compared to western animation. Secondary actions should reinforce the primary actions. If the secondary movements get in the way of the primary movements, the animation becomes crowded and the narrative becomes blurred.

Overlapping action and Follow Through

Many objects are made up of several different objects connected to each other, and many times these objects follow the objects of higher mass to which they are connected. Overlap is when the main object starts to move, the secondary object attached to the main object slowly follows the main object while trying to stay where it is due to the law of conservation of energy, and then when the main object completes its movement, the secondary object moves ahead of the main object and then slowly returns to its original position by moving back and forth. When the secondary object overtakes the main object, it is called overshoot, and when it slowly (or directly) returns to its original position, it is called settle.
Solid drawing

In order to give the feeling that the still images in the animation are moving, the objects we draw must have consistency between the frames. If this is not achieved, we will not feel the same object moving. At best, we feel like the object is deforming or changing.

Anticipation

In Turkish, it means expectation. It is called the movements that will create the expectation of the movement we actually want to show. If our anticipation is not strong enough or directly absent, the audience may not realize what they see when they see the animation we want to show them, they may not see it well enough or the effectiveness of the scene may decrease. An example of anticipation is when someone who wants to throw a punch first stretches backwards.


Appeal

The characters we draw have to be "lookable" for the audience. They don't have to be beautiful, handsome and so on. It's more about being able to make an ugliness attractive, and maybe we should include the silhouette under this principle.

Staging

It's simply cinematography. We need to manage the scene so that the audience looks where we want them to look. There are various techniques for this. Let's list the ones that are simply applicable and understandable.

Rule of 3
Silhouettes
Focal point


Exaggaration

In Turkish, it means to exaggerate. Since it is more difficult to understand a movement in animation than in real life, animations need to be intensely exaggerated so that the audience can understand the movements more easily. In addition, since we are trying to evoke feelings in the audience while making art, exaggerating a situation will be more useful in evoking the feelings we want.

Now that we have learned the 12 principles, we can use these techniques no matter what kind of animation we make.