School of Motion—Animation Bootcamp: The Secret Life of Ease

Eleven weeks ago I started my first ever School of Motion course and today I’m proud to say that I’ve completed all course work and materials, including the final assignment. There is still another week of extended critique left, but instead of revisiting old assignments, I’m planning to take all of the feedback I’ve received over the past two and a half months, and work it into my future projects.

Week 8, the final week of course material, was all about taking the lessons learned and actually breaking some of the rules! Additionally, it was also about bringing everything together in a minute-long animation. When it came time to make things perfectly imperfect in our penultimate Side Burns Elvis assignment, I was surprised to learn that breaking some animation rules actually meant making sure that the principles still held up. What do I mean by that? By using elements like hold keyframes to resemble a stop-motion feel, we were advised to remember the principles of timing, spacing, follow through and overlap, so that even though the motion felt a little jerky, the animation itself still felt like it made sense. As Joey put it, “the goal [was] to make [the animation] feel off, but not too far off so that it feels crappy.”

Bringing everything together in the Ice Sculptor assignment for Weeks 9-12 was the apex of the course. Here we were instructed to take everything we learned and pour it into a minute long video. One thing that I’d like to practice post-Bootcamp is to focus on intentional animation. Discussions with my TA, Algernon Quashie, revealed that one way to do this is through storyboarding, so before I opened up After Effects for the Ice Sculptor assignment, it was quite literally back to the drawing board for me. While watching what Joey had blocked out for all of the students, I did my best to storyboard my entire animation, asking myself what would be the prominent elements in each scene, how to construct interesting movements among those elements and how to transition from scene to scene. I was laying down some basic art direction and it felt really good to know where my animation was going from start to finish before ever creating any keyframes. Below is an example of one of my storyboard pages built from a free template courtesy of Boords.com.

Once everything was boarded out it was time to jump into After Effects. I started manipulating various design elements and played around with timing and spacing to get the desired feeling in my movements. I found myself focusing on weight a lot, and how to give every element a sense of it. Some areas of my animation still feel a little stiff to me, but I’m always reminding myself how important it is to incorporate follow through. I’ll admit, I did find myself going back to old habits at times while working through this animation (i.e., not animating every single element in a scene), but going forward I hope to strike a good balance between those old habits and new ones, like knowing when it’s appropriate to animate every element on screen versus when to animate just a few as an example.

As Joey mentioned endlessly throughout the course, an animation doesn’t have to be complex to feel interesting. Sure there were lots of design elements to play with while working on the Ice Sculptor assignment, but the real problem to solve was how to effectively use (or not use) them to tell the deeper story of the ice sculptor. One of the first questions I asked myself when I opened up the After Effects file was, “what is the most important part of this story?” Was it the different characters—the lumberjack and the ice sculptor? Was it the chainsaw? Or was it something more abstract like the craft? Whatever it was going to be, I wanted to know how was I going to effectively highlight it so that I made an emotional connection with whomever watched the animation. Yes, the purpose of the assignment was to bring together everything that we technically learned over the past eleven weeks, but effectively communicating is equally, if not more, important. I’m not entirely sure I achieved this result with my piece, but it’s something I plan to dive even deeper into on future projects. I can confidently say though that I came out of Animation Bootcamp with a wealth of technical knowledge and then some. I had the opportunity to revisit animation principles that got lost in my work over the years and build on my storytelling skills with intentional animation, and that, I believe, is a success worth celebrating.

To say I would recommend this course to anyone interested in animation is an understatement. Please, if you are interested in either learning animation from scratch or looking to enhance your keyframes, Animation Bootcamp by School of Motion is a no brainer. Thank you to the entire School of Motion staff for your support and expertise over these past eleven weeks, and for all that you do to serve the greater animation and motion graphics communities.

A special thank you must go out to Joey Korenman for being the best animation teacher in the biz. It was so much fun learning from you and you have no idea how much I enjoyed your puns. Shoutout to my fellow classmates as well! It’s been a pleasure learning alongside you all. I hope our paths cross again in the future :)

Keep it easy-ease!

School of Motion—Animation Bootcamp: Straight Outta Comp

I can’t believe another full week of Animation Bootcamp is over! This whole course is flying by and I’m sad to see it starting to come to an end. We’ve got one more week of active learning left and then a few weeks of extended critique before it’s all over. Time flies when you’re animating!

Week 7 was all about taking the principles we’ve studied for the past six weeks and bringing them all together in one animation. For our homework assignments we took simple designs and gave them life by incorporating things like anticipation, decay, follow through, secondary animation, timing, spacing and the subtleties of eye tracing and reinforcing movement. As Joey said, Week 7 was all about “adding extra layers of movement to help your primary animation feel good.” And you don’t need to build something super complex to make it feel good either!

“Animation doesn’t have to be super fancy or complex for it to look and feel interesting.”

— Joey Korneman

As I worked through the assignments for this week I found myself falling into old habits and really had to go back and review my notes from the week so that I made sure to add some reinforcing movement to my animations and make sure the movements in my animation weren’t jarring to the eye. Eye tracing is going to be something that I specifically pay attention to going forward in my career. It’s the secret sauce that allows visuals to effectively communicate to a viewer and draw your eye around the screen.

Below is an example of one of the assignments from this week. As always, there is definitely room for improvement, but I’m hoping as we approach our last week of active learning that I can take the feedback from each assignment and everything that I’ve learned from the course to make my final homework assignment feel extra special. One more week to go before our extended critique period so let’s go!

School of Motion—Animation Bootcamp: The Terminanimator & Catch Up Week

I’m playing some serious catch up over here so I apologize for missing last week’s update, but now that I’m finally caught up it’s time to dive into some animation fun from Weeks 5 and 6!

Week 5 was all about squash & stretch and secondary animation, two principles that are crucial to creating nice looking animations. We started the week off with squash and stretch, and let me tell you, this principle is one that can easily be overdone if not handled with care. When you think of squash and stretch you probably think of cartoons, right? How about the Looney Tunes? Those cartoons are some of the first that I think of because of the amount of exaggerated squash and strech used, and exaggerated squash and stretch is no stranger to Warner Brothers Studio. So why does such exaggerated squash and stretch work in a cartoon world like the Looney Tunes? To mimic motion blur. Animators use squash and stretch to mimic motion blur in vector or cel-based worlds so that they create that feeling of realism. But what about squash and stretch in the photoreal world? Well, it ultimately depends on the look and feel you’re trying to achieve, but if you’re trying to recreate some live action, then like most things in life, a little goes a long way. The truth is, however, that these answers aren’t so black and white as we’d like to believe. Squash and stretch, and all of the other principles for that matter, really depend on what feeling you’re trying to achieve, and that in and of itself can morph into a much larger conversation.

Squash and stretch is interesting because—depending on what style you’re going for—too much of it doesn’t look quite right and too little makes an animation feel flat. That’s because another law of physics, Hooke’s Law, tells you how much you should squash and stretch based on an object’s elasticity. Hooke’s Law states that the strain of an object is proportional to the stress applied to it as it retains its material volume/density. Sound familiar? Maybe if you’re an engineer. Hooke’s Law is similar to the Law of Conservation, which states that mass-energy of an isolated system remains constant. The volume of an object is always conserved. Bet you didn’t think you’d be learning this much about physics in a creative blog did you? Let’s keep going…

So now that we understand how much squash and stretch we should be applying to our animations let’s see it in action. You’ll notice in the above homework assignment that the ball bouncing around the scene has minimal squash and stretch in the beginning and a larger amount during the speed ramp. The amount of S&S (shorthand for squash and stretch) feels right in both instances compared to the ball’s movements and impacts (at least I hope…I’m still a student here). We’re conserving the ball’s volume throughout the animation and adding just enough S&S to make it feel life-like. But what else do you notice in this scene? If you guessed follow through then you are correct. Another way to make an animation feel life-like, as we learned a couple of weeks ago, is with follow through, and believe it or not the same forces that create follow through also create squash and stretch! We’re starting to see after six short weeks of bootcamp that not only are all of the principles building on one another, but that a lot of the principles we use to create movement in our animations are dictated by similar forces. Cue the mindblown emoji.

The second half of week five was dedicated to secondary animation, which simply put, is animation that supports the primary animation of a piece. Think about any object you’ve seen flying through the air in an animated video. Have you ever seen a few lines trail behind the object as it flies across screen? That is one of the many examples of secondary animation, which is (quite literally) called a trail, and it is used frequently. Trails and impacts are some of the most common, but there are many other clever ways to integrate secondary animation into your pieces. Take this explainer piece by my wonderful friends over at Dash for instance. They created this video for their client Wolfspeed to highlight the capabilities of the Wolfspeed silicone carbide power module. As you watch the video you see examples of secondary animation everywhere—the glowing swirl around the power module as it flies upward, the elements that pop up when the module slams back down to the ground, etc. All of these actions are accentuating the primary animation and they draw your eye to the hero of each shot, which is the silicone carbide power module. Secondary animation, I’d say your work here is done.

Week six has allowed me to go back and revise some of my previous homework assignments based on my TA notes and catch up on all of the assignments from last week. It was interesting to see how much I’ve learned as I created new iterations of older assignments, and incorporate all that I’ve learned into the new ones. This week was a much needed catch up week indeed, but next week we’ll be diving back into the nitty gritty so I hope you’ll continue to follow along as we get into the final weeks of Animation Bootcamp. Stay tuned!

School of Motion—Animation Bootcamp: Trouble with the Curve

Ah yes, the reality of juggling continuing education and work. Inevitably there comes a time when you have to play catch-up. Well, that’s me today. I fell a little behind on my course work last week so last Friday’s weekly wrap is coming to you on a Monday instead. But hey, what better way to start your work week than with some new ani-MON-tion insight, am I right?

Last week was all about bounces and follow throughs, and honestly, both principles were very similar to oscillations and decay curves. I can now see a pattern forming—a layering of animation principles if you will—and everything is finally starting to make sense. Even the concept of weight is becoming more and more clear. Remember how important it was to establish the weight of an animated object a few weeks ago? Well last week we took that question one step further and added a few more questions to our animation arsenal, including “what is the surface made out of that the object is colliding with?” and “what are the forces acting on this object?” Both very important questions on how to animate an object’s interaction with another object, and specifically, how to animate a bounce.

Let’s use a ball bounce as an example and start by talking about a ball’s weight. A light ball, something like a golf ball, when dropped on a hard wood floor will transfer some of its energy to the floor and use the remaining energy to bounce back up. Each consecutive bounce will follow the laws of physics and use whatever remaining energy is available to continue bouncing until it ultimately rolls to a stop. Now take a heavier ball, something like a bowling ball, and drop it on a hard wood floor. What happens? It bounces, but it bounces significantly less, right? That’s because more energy is transferred to the hardwood floor from the bowling ball than the golf ball and thus creating less bounces. But now consider both the golf ball and the bowling ball bouncing on a carpeted floor. What does that look like? Since there’s more friction involved, both balls have even less energy to use which means fewer bounces overall. Sure the golf ball will still bounce more than the bowling ball will, but the golf ball will bounce significantly less than it did on the hard wood floor because of this added force. Gravity, inertia and friction are just a few of the forces that make animations feel real, and when we mimic that realism we give our animations that correct feeling.

Follow through was the second principle we learned about last week, and is another way to add a sense of realism to any animation. Follow through, simply put, is overlapping motion. It’s when part of an object stops and the rest of the object settles into place relative to its center mass (this video by Alan Becker is incredibly helpful). You can find examples of follow through in everyday life—a person walking and swinging their arms, coming to a sudden stop while driving while your body continues to move forward, and waving a fly swatter in the air and having the top of it settle into place. Much like the other principles we’ve talked about over the past few weeks, the exaggeration of your follow through will affect the character of your animation. And much like bounce, the weight of an object will determine how much follow through it will have too.

Below is one of the assignments from last week involving follow through. The concept was based on a pool noodle, and although my noodles aren’t incredibly bendy, there is some follow through in their movement. There’s still so much to practice and learn, and I plan to take the lessons from last week and apply them to this week’s assignments as we begin to explore squash and stretch. To be continued!

School of Motion—Animation Bootcamp: Lost in Spacing

We made it to another Friday, which means another weekly recap of Animation Bootcamp! There was a noticeable difference in the intensity of the course material and homework this week compared to last, but the knowledge gained was tenfold.

Everything that Joey talked about this week really hit home as to why I enrolled in Animation Bootcamp in the first place. As we took a deeper dive into timing and spacing through the value and speed graph editors, we talked a lot about character and how it relates to the principles of animation. We’ll continue to talk about each of these principles in more detail as the course progresses, but this week we specifically talked about anticipation and exaggeration, and—wait for this mind-blowing moment—how they’re actually deeper forms of the timing (and spacing) principle(s). Yeah, I know, seems obvious when you read it out loud right? But boy was this a mic drop moment.

We also explored the concepts of oscillations and overshoots and how they relate to the above three principles as well. It was amazing to see how just the slightest bit of exaggeration gave Joey’s demonstrations so much character. Needless to say, I couldn’t wait to apply these new principles (along with several of Joey’s tips and tricks to making them feel life-like) to my homework assignments.

Remember how last week I mentioned the importance of giving an animation some weight? Well, anticipation and exaggeration are two of the many ways to selling that point. Take the above homework assignment for example. For this assignment we were tasked with animating a fictitious Johnny Dreidel logo using everything we learned about the graph editors and the concepts of anticipation, oscillation and overshoots. In hindsight I probably could’ve done more with the text animation, but my focus was on the cube animations. How was I going to give them character? How was I going to give them life? Learning the proper way to create a decay was one of the bigger lessons I took away from this week so I knew I wanted to incorporate that into this homework assignment specifically. After (badly) acting out the ways in which I wanted this logo reveal to happen, I decided I wanted to give the cubes a cartoon-like weight and elasticity, and thus played around a lot with the anticipation and decay (oscillation) of the cubes as they settled into place. I also wanted to give my animations a sense of purpose too, so again, while I probably could’ve done more with the text animation portion of the assignment, I wanted to add even more weight to the cubes and decided to use the front cube as a driver for the text animation, shooting it out from underneath as it came down with force. It may be my first pass at the assignment, but I’m quite pleased with the character I’ve given this little logo treatment through exaggerated decays, anticipations and overshoots.

I gained a TON of technical knowledge from working in the value and speed graph editors this week. I’m sure my classmates would agree that there’s a lot of curves-wrangling and tedious adjusting that goes into achieving the desired look and feel of an animation while working with these tools. But despite the exponential gains of working in After Effects this week, the overall biggest takeaway for me would have to be this connecting-the-dots moment:

“The 12 principles of animation are based off of character animation...so give your animations (and motion graphics) character!”