The Animation Process

The Animation Process
Digital Graphics and Animation

Planning your Animation
Workflow Basics

Workflow Basics:
I. Establish concept and goals – start by defining the
challenges of the project and the following criteria:
• What’s the message you want to deliver?
• Who’s the audience?
• Existing elements (in the case of branding materials)
• Competition (if any)

Workflow Basics:
I. Establish concept and goals – start by defining the
challenges of the project and the following criteria:
• Emotional heart and feeling of the message
• Output – DVD, CD, Web
• Software
• Hardware

Workflow Basics:
II. Project goals – determine what is expected in completing
the project
• What’s your role – how do you fit in?
• Deliverables
• Payment

Workflow Basics:
IV. Approving final concept and budget:
• Meeting with clients
• Contracts
• Setting Milestones for Review

Workflow Basics:
V. Producing the result:
• Create folder(s) and file structure
• Adding files
• Naming files properly

Animation Strategies
Understanding and Communicating Motion
to Tell a Story

1. Establishing Ground Rules:
• Considering your Signature / Personal style
• Structure – developing rules to guide your designs so that
the animation support your ideas - e.g. knowing how to
differentiate between a home movie and an engrossing
motion picture
• Using music as an example – all music has an underlying
structure of notes and timing

2. Defining Variables:
• Establish a tone – peaceful, quiet, fast, slick, funny, scary
• What kind of motion suits the style of the project or
personality of a character?
• How does colour communicate your theme or idea?
• How does sound support the atmosphere or character?
• Be consistent, don’t try to do a bit of everything

I. The Environment:
Establishing a look and feel of your project – Art Direction
or Production Design -
• How light or dark is it?
• Is everything distinct or blurry?
• How crowded or spacious is it?
• How quickly does things move?

I. The Environment:
• How does gravity affect objects?
• Is space limited or endless?
• Help the audience locate themselves in the environment
you create

I. The Environment:
• Consider historical and cultural contexts – Retro?
Post-modern? Futuristic? Multicultural? Or a specific
subculture?

II. The Materials:
Consider the finer details of your environment -
• Do you want elements to be Smooth? Jagged? Hard?
Fuzzy? Squishy?
• How much volume does the graphic elements have? Are
they transparent?
• If objects are soft, hard heavy or light, the motion must
relate to them

VI. The Motion:
• Controlling the speed and pattern
• Analyze the real world
• Study rhythm and timing

2. Adding Personality:
• How fast or slow does an object move? Does it accelerate
or decelerate?
• How does an object(s) movement loop or change over
time? Finding the right music to establish timing and pace
usually helps in this regard
• Is the object’s motion repetitive or random?

2. Adding Personality:
• Does the object give some visual cue as to its movement
or is it sudden?
• How big or small are the movements the object can make?
Does it move all around the screen or is it restricted to a
specific area? How much of the object moves at any time?

2. Manipulating Perception and Depth:
• Using sylized methods to play tricks on your audience
• Supension of disbelief – If you believe its real then it is
• Visual tricks such as a swirling cyclone of lines to show a
character’s feet moving very fast
• Consider cartoon effects such as a cloud with hands and
feet sticking out to show a fight or moving lines to show a
gust of wind

I. Viewpoint, Framing and Depth:
• Use of perspective
• Planning overlapping of images – avoiding tangents by not
allowing foreground and background images to touch each
other
• Using a natural frame as a reference point to exaggerate
depth e.g. creating the viewpoint of looking out the back of a
van or a character running into the camera to convey panic

II. Anticipation:
• Adding bounces to exaggerate a character walking
• Winding up before a run
• Follow through to head turns

II. Anticipation:
• Adding bounces to exaggerate a character walking
• Winding up before a run
• Follow through to head turns
III. Secondary Motion:
• E.g., movement of a character’s belly and/or a hat during a
run

2. Understanding the Laws of Nature:
• Inertia – objects should show a change in force if there is a
change in motion e.g. use of ease in and out
• Acceleration – gravitational forces act differently on objects
of different mass e.g., a canonball and a feather falling to
the ground

2. Understanding the Laws of Nature:
• Action / reaction force pairs – for every action there is an
equal and opposite reaction e.g., a ball bouncing back in the
air lower and lower after hitting the ground or a character
pulling a rope and falling back after the rope snaps

Creating Timeline
Animation and Effects
Time Based vs. Frame Based

Creating Timeline Animation and
Effects
Time Based:
This is animation that is created over time where keyframes
are set at specific points to define the action e.g., key poses
of a character and the software creates the in-between
frames or tweening.
This method is used in 3D Animation or Motion Graphics.

Effects

Effects
Frame Based:
This is animation that is created frame-by-frame where a
drawing is done at each stage of movement over a set time
period.
This is also called traditional animation and used in cartoons.

Effects
1. Methods:
• Frame by frame animation
• Tweened animation – shape and motion
• Timeline effects – e.g. dissolves, plug-ins (After Effects)
• Path animation
• Animated masks

Effects
2. Storyboarding Scenes and Shots:
• Sketching key moments – like a comic strip
• Description of Scenes, e.g., “A Bright and Sunny Day at the
Beach...”
• Description of Shots, e.g., Wide Shot, Medium Close Up,
Extreme Close Up
• Description of Sound FX, Dialogue, Visual FX, etc.

Effects
Animatic:
In animation and special effects work, the storyboarding stage
may be followed by simplified mock-ups called "animatics" to give
a better idea of how the scene will look and feel with motion and
timing.
At its simplest, an animatic is a series of still images edited
together and displayed in sequence with a rough dialogue and/or
rough sound track added to the sequence of still images (usually
taken from a storyboard) to test whether the sound and images
are working effectively together.

Effects
Shot Sizes:
An extreme close-up (ECU) makes a very small details
such as only part of a character's facefill the screen.
A close-up (CU) is a shot framed tightly on a specific area,
like a character's face.
A medium close-up (MCU) widens the scope further. A
character's head and shoulders would constitute a
medium close-up.

Effects
Shot Sizes:
A medium shot (MS) shows a broader area than a close-up.
Often a medium shot shows a character's upper body,
arms, and head.
A wide shot (WS or WIDE) shows a broad view of an entire
location, subject, or action. Often a wide shot will show an
entire character from head to toe, or a whole group of
characters.

Effects
Wider shots can show whole environments, capture broader actions,
or show the positions of multiple characters at once. Before moving in
to show close-up detail, you can give your audience an idea of the
overall scene with an establishing shot.
An establishing shot is usually a wide shot that sets up the scene and
shows the surroundings that might not be appear in each close-up.
For example, an establishing shot might show the exterior of a
building, providing context for the location where an interior scene is
to follow.

Effects
Z-Axis Blocking:
A shot can function as both a close-up and a wide shot at
once by using a technique called z-axis blocking: populating
a scene with subjects at varying distances from the camera.
Z-axis blocking may sound like a computer graphics term,
but in reality cinematographers were using the phrase long
before the advent of 3D rendering.

Effects
Z-Axis Blocking:

Effects
POV Shots:
A point-of-view shot (POV) creates the illusion of viewing the
scene from a character's perspective.
Usually you will want to hide the character whose POV is
being shown; you don't need to show body parts, such as
arms and hands moving as the character walks, in a POV.

Effects
The Two-Shot:
Specific types of shots can be put together to help you stage a
conversation, interview, or other scenes in which two characters
are facing each other.
While this is a convenient, straightforward way to show both
characters, it can look flat and uninteresting. To make a scene
more visually diverse, you can use a two-shot as an establishing
shot, and then cut in to close-ups and over-the-shoulder shots.

Effects
The Two-Shot:

Effects
The Over-the-Shoulder Shot:
An over-the-shoulder shot (OSS) is a close-up or medium shot
that focuses on one of the characters while showing just enough of
the other characters portion of his back and shoulder, generally to
indicate his position.
A series of shots that alternate between an OSS of each
character, sometimes also including close-ups of the
characters, is called shot/countershot coverage.

Effects
High-Angle and Low-Angle Shots:
A low-angle shot, with the camera positioned below your
character, looking up, can serve to make a character look bigger,
stronger, more honest, or more noble. Low-angle shots can also
exaggerate the size of environments and architectural spaces.
A high-angle shot, with the camera aimed downward from a
position above the character, can make a character look sly, small,
young, weak, confused, cute, or childlike.

Effects
High-Angle and Low-Angle Shots:

Effects
Camera Moves:
Pan: In a pan, the camera rotates from side to side so that it aims
more to the left or right. The camera does not change location in a
pan; it needs only to face a different direction. Panning is one of
the most common and subtle of all camera moves.
Tilt: The camera rotates to aim upward or downward, without
changing the position where the camera is mounted. Both a tilt
and a pan can be done while the camera is mounted on a tripod.

Effects
Camera Moves:
Zoom: The camera's lens is adjusted to increase or decrease the
camera's field of view, magnifying a portion of the scene without
moving the camera. A zoom in narrows the field of view to create
more of a close-up, while a zoom out widens the field of view.
Rack focus: A camera's focal distance changes during a shot, so
that subjects at a different distance from the camera come into or
fall out of focus, This is also called a focus pull.

Effects
Camera Moves:
Dolly: The camera's actual position changes, such as to move
alongside a subject or to travel closer to a character during a scene. A
dolly in moves the camera physically closer to the subject, to create
more of a close-up. A dolly out backs the camera away from the
subject.
Dollying is considered more dramatic but also more noticeable than
zooming, because a dolly actually changes the camera's perspective.

Effects
The Rule of Thirds:
Placing a subject dead-center in a frame does not look very
natural or interesting, and generally produces a bad
composition. Your rendering will look better composed if you
place your subject off-center.
A useful guideline when composing a shot is to picture the
frame divided into thirds, both horizontally and vertically, This
is known as the rule of thirds.

Effects
The Rule of Thirds:
Your shot will be better composed
if you position the subject along
one of the lines (shown in black),
or position a subject that you want
noticed exactly at a point where
two lines intersect (shown in red).

Effects
Positive and Negative Space:
Most images can be said to consist of both positive space
and negative space. Positive space is the part of the frame
showing the main subject or foreground objects. Negative
space can be considered the background, or the area
around the subject.
Composition is a balance between the positive and negative
space.

Effects

Effects
A balanced composition (top) leaves
look space for a character
(shown in yellow).
An unbalanced composition (bottom)
can trap your eye in the side of the
frame.

Effects
Lines:
Another way to examine and improve your composition is to picture the
dominant lines that can be seen within the shot. Look at any line, whether
it is the horizon, a fence, or the edge of a shadow, and think about where
it leads.
People's eyes naturally follow lines within the image, so placing an
interesting subject along a line, or having lines within your composition
point to a subject that you want a viewer to notice, will help direct people
where you want them to look.

Effects
Lines:

Effects
Tangencies:
A tangency is a place where two lines meet within your
composition, such as where an edge of one object aligns
with an edge of another object, or where a shadow falls
along an edge in a surface.
When two lines become tangent, they essentially become
the same line in your composition, and that can cause your
scene to lose definition.

Effects
Tangencies:
Courtesy - http://digital-lighting.150m.com/ch07.html

Effects
3. Conceptual Drawings:
• Characters
• Backgrounds
• Objects
• Establishing the Look and Feel of the project

Effects
4. Exporting Animation:
• Formats - .avi, quicktime (.mov) or sequence of still images
• Output to Film, Video Tape, Internet, DVD - Must be familiar
with all and depending on your deliverables
• Video is 30 Frames Per Second (FPS), Film is 24 fps, but
can be at lower rates as well for cartoon animation and higher
(60 fps) for 3D Animation

Effects
Persistence of Vision:
Persistence of vision is the phenomenon of the eye by which
an afterimage is thought to persist for approximately one
twenty-fifth of a second on the retina.
In drawn animation, moving characters are often shot "on
twos", that is to say, one drawing is shown for every two
frames of film (which usually runs at 24 frames per second),
meaning there are only 12 drawings per second.

Effects
Persistence of Vision:
Animation for most "Saturday morning cartoons" is produced
as cheaply as possible, and is most often shot on "threes", or
even "fours", i.e. three or four frames per drawing. This
translates to only 8 or 6 drawings per second, respectively.

Effects
This animated cartoon of a
galloping horse is displayed at
12 drawings per second, and
the fast motion is on the edge
of being objectionably jerky.

Effects
Formats and Aspect Ratios:
The actual frames in which you arrange your scene can have
different proportions, depending on the format of film or
television for which you are rendering your animation.
The proportion of the width to the height of an image is called
its aspect ratio. For example, if the width of an image were
exactly twice its height, it would have an aspect ratio of 2:1.

Effects
Formats and Aspect Ratios:

Effects
Cropping and Overscan:
In television, a cropping problem occurs when a process called
overscanning crops a portion of a video signal off of the screen.
Important actions should be kept in the center 90 percent of the
screen, because some viewers might miss them if they happen too
near the edge.
Most software programs have optional guides to safe image areas
that can be displayed in your viewport.

Effects
Cropping and Overscan:

Consider these techniques as you plan your next project.
Animation can be rewarding despite its challenges. One must
be open minded, prepared to take risks and above all, have
fun doing it!
Next Activity - Animation Concept and Storyboard
Exercise

The Animation Process

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