Hello friend! I think your animations are absolutely amazing!! i started teaching myself to animate recently and only managed to do small 5 frame loops haha. My biggest struggle is figuring out what each frame is supposed to look like for a certain action. How do you manage to do it? it's pure magic! ;w; thank you for the inspiration!!
Hi there! Thanks so much, I’m glad you like my stuff! Ok, so it sounds like you might need a little help figuring out keyframes? I’ll do the best I can to explain.
Keyframes are basically charting a course for the animation. It’s the big poses you wanna hit.
Check out this little dude. Let’s say I wanna animate him doing a cool super mario-sorta jump. To make that look good, I’d imagine he has to squad down before jumping that high. So I key out my frames. First drawing is him standing, and later in the animation I’d wanna have him squatting. And finally a few drawings after that, I finish with the jump! I’m not sure how many frames of animation I’d need between that, so to start I just assume I’d need 2 between each of them. I’ll tweak it later.
So let’s add some inbetweens, and here’s what we’ve got.
I made some inbetweens that slowly moves out of the first keypose and slowly settles into the second keypose. And since the jump is such a big motion, I quickly draw into that motion. And animated (at 12 fps), it looks...
Hm. That’s not so bad, but something’s a little off. He’s popping too quickly into the jumping pose. So what can we do to fix that? We can play with the positions of some of the frames or try adding inbetweens. But to keep this simple, how about I just try swapping some of the frames I have there already?
What about these guys? Frames 3 and 4. That would make it so that our keypose comes out sooner, and instead of settling our motion into it, we’re actually turning it into an overshoot, where the character’s motion moves him a little bit passed the keyframe. That’s typically how most quick, snappy movements are animated. It can look more fluid if you add a few more inbetweens, but don’t over do it with adding too many drawings!
Ok, so how does it look now?
That’s a little better! The overshoot helps us ease into the jumping pose a little better, since he’s motioning his body back before the jump. I’d probably add a few more drawings here and there to this one, but for sake of example Lil’ Jumpin Guy looks fine the way he is.
Hopefully this helps you a little bit! Strong keyposes help you make much better-looking animations, so be sure to plan out your animation before going in adding your inbetweens! I hope none of this information seems too confusing, or if I’ve accidentally misinformed you in anyway. Keep at it!
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