Such Impossible Bliss

“The Beast…It must be the Beast out there. The obsidian cricket of our inevitable twilight, singing a requiem.”

A himbo

A mean bisexual

An even meaner lesbian

She/theys

He/theys

A token straight that's on thin ice

An astrology bitch who has everyone's birth chart memorized

And a short king

IS THIS WHAT U MEAN ANON omg im not suure ;;

or do u mean like in ¾ view…

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.

There’s a LOT of things that go into animation and I definitely can’t cover everything all at once (im sure you dont want me to either) so I’ll try to keep it simple!

But for forewarning, I take animation very seriously and can’t help but info dump.

1. Your animation isnt going to work immediately. it’s going to be awful. accept that and move on.

2. Don’t give up when your animation doesn’t work!!! i swear ive seen people try to animate for their very first time with like a walk cycle and immediately after the first test shoot they played they just dropped it and i was like honey!! honey no you made half of a single step and didnt in-between it. You aren’t done, thats why it looks bad! You don’t say a drawing sucks and throw it out halfway through drawing a single eye, you draw the rest of the face and see how it looks in the end. that’s how you have to look at making animation.

3. It’s a lot more work than you think it’s going to be. animation runs at 24 frames per second, that’s 24 drawings a second. some people do it 12 drawings or even 8 drawings a second, but no matter what it’s a lot of dang drawings.

4. Rough drawing rough drawing ROUGH DRAWING! when you start animating things, don’t even THINK about detail! for example, if you want to animate someone walking, animate a circle for the head and a rectangle for their body, that’s all the detail you need to start with. once that is COMPLETELY and i mean completely entirely animated to a point where you are satisfied, THEN you can start to add detail.

5. References!!!! they’re everywhere! and you need to use them! if you want to animate a bird flying, you either look out your window, find a video on youtube, or get a diagram but don’t just try to guess or it won’t work, i promise you

6. Try as many different methods as you can! everyone animates differently. maybe my advice won’t apply to you at all, these things are just what works for me! I have friends who animate from the roughest of rough drawings and others who start every drawing completely detailed. some friends animate from major pose to major pose and others animate frame by frame.

7. HAVE FUN! if you aren’t having a fun time animating, then what are you doing? Ask yourself this question and then figure out what you need to do to MAKE it fun! It makes the work better for everyone in the end!

Now get ready for a link dump!

other animation advice from yours truly! which will be somewhat repetitive

tips for beginners

basic tips

12 principles of animation

living lines library: archive of old animation tests for many movies

really good animation books (links to amazon)

animators survival kit

the illusion of life: disney animation

cartoon animation

elemental magic: the art of special effects animation

animation programs

tv paint (indefinite free trial, does not allow saving or exports)

toon boom has 21 day free trials

pencil 2d is free to use

adobe photoshop and flash also work