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!”