| Action | ||||||||
| (These pages are exerpts from the book, 'Animation: The Basic Principles') This one should be pretty obvious. Without action, there is no movement and thus no need for animation. The action is always the main movement and takes place between your two primary keys. It could be two or three movements strung together but the principle is still the same. There is no one set rule for an action because there is more than just one action available... there are billions! There’s no limit. If you can think it, you can animate it. ACTION Here we should talk a bit about the Laws of Motion. Sir Isaac Newton, who for all intents and purposes would have made a pretty good animator, came up with what are now known as Newton’s Laws of Motion. 1. Every object (or character) has weight and moves only when a force is applied to it. 2. An object (or character) at rest tends to stay at rest until a force moves it. Once it is moving it tends to keep moving in a straight line until another force or object stops it. Without the illusion of weight your characters will appear to float In real life, we have naturally come to accept the way things move and act simply because we see it all around us and it’s just the way things are. If we hold a rubber ball out in front of us and let go of it, we all know what will happen next: it will fall from our hand and drop to the ground and bounce a few times. Each bounce will get smaller and smaller finally coming to a stop. Something would be very wrong if it were to do otherwise. We also know that for you to hold onto a ball you must send a message from your brain to your hand that you want to grip the ball with your fingers and thumb. Your brain tells the muscles in your arm to constrict, tightening the tendons in your fingers which makes them bend and thus grip the ball. Nobody really gives these actions any major conscious thought, we just do it! As animators, these actions must be thoroughly thought through, not just the mechanical aspects of a motion, but also the emotional and psychological motivators. Your characters must appear and act as though they were alive and real, with the ability to think, judge, make decisions and act. Without this, they will appear to be merely puppets controlled by some unseen hand. This is a rather awesome task when you begin to think about it. So, how do you do it?, is what most people ask. These are the first two steps. All the things we see happening around us must be consciously observed. This means “with a concerted effort”, to see the action taking place in all it’s individual components. Then the analysis of exactly what happened, where it happened, how it happened, and why it happened. This analysis must be placed in a physical and time context. By physical I mean, how did the arm move in relation to the wrist, the shoulder, the head, torso, waist, hips, legs, and so on. This includes three dimensional space as well. By time I mean, in seconds and 24th’s of a second, as this is the rate of timing used in animation. Does the arm take one second (or 24 frames) to swing from front extreme to back extreme or does it take 18 frames? This will determine the speed of the action. The third step is drawing. This includes the mental aspect of understanding the principles of drawing outlined in Section 3 and the other principles of animation as well as the physical skills of being able to draw. This part can be very laborious and time consuming. The learning process will never end, it can’t because there are too many possibilities to animate something in a different way, attitude, timing, mood, character, etc. This is the true wonder and excitement that animation is all about. Most actions resolve into ANTICIPATION / ACTION / REACTION Keep this clearly in mind when working on your animation. Think of your animation as words that make up a sentence and series of sentences. The way you pace and phrase the wording gives greater meaning to the overall statement. |
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