(3) 2d character animation - Keying
One of the most important things you need to worry about when you create an animation is the keyframes. Keyframe animators, are usually considered senior animators (in a professional studio) that decide on critical aspects of the animation. Each studio has different roles that keyframe animators have to fill, but generally speaking they are in charge of translating the storyboards into a fluid animation. Depending on the size of the studio, you may also find “regular” animators and in-betweeners. Since I come from a position of someone who does everything from the beginning to the end, you’ll be getting a more holistic view. Going into the animation hierarchy is really beyond the scope of this mini-lesson. I’ll be focusing on how you would want to handle yourself when you are creating keyframes for your animation, specifically keyframing characters.
First you would ideally have a character sheet (to make your life easier, to make it more accurate to the vision of the designers or directors or… to yourself)
I didn’t make one, but you’ll have to forgive me.
I like martial arts, so I wanted to try animating a “jump spinning hook kick”.
The first thing you need to do is to make the “keys,” or keyframes. For those who don’t know what keyframes are, they are just points in the animation that define major movements and/or change in movements of objects (in our case characters).
So here we have the character:
We definitely want the point of contact to be a key.
And the landing.
Now that we have the major keys down, we can start breaking them up into smoother and more refined movements. We have to ask ourselves how does the human body move when performing this kick and to answer that question you would have to get references!
Keep adding keyframes at important positions in the movement, this you really need to develop a feel for.
I added another element to the animation to have the character seemingly be reacting to something (just to make it more interesting).
Expand on what the element is by laying out important keys (as you did before)
Now as a key animator you are in charge of laying out the length of exposures each frame has. If you’re working in a professional setting, you will probably get an X-sheet (or exposure sheet). This is a good time to start thinking which frames need to be extended and which need to be shortened.
I wanted to exaggerate the kick so I extended the exposure of the kick.
Now that you have a blueprint of where you want to go, you can start filling in the spaces where extra frames are needed.
Really once you have your point A and point B set, it’s fairly simple to fill in the blanks. The important part is getting point A and point B just right. Having a smooth animation is not as important as having good movement (imo). Part of the charm that Japanese animation has is the interesting choice of shots/angles/poses that make up for the lack of frames (in comparison to the fluid frames you would normally see in a Disney animation).
Keyframes can also be used for changing the backgrounds, and perspective lines more broadly. Although seeing hand-drawn backgrounds has become rarer and rarer these days because of how much easier it is to generate it with 3d software.
Hope that helps, I realize these are very basic but hopefully I can expand into more complicated stuff in the future.
