This book is dedicated to all those animators out there and to Kaedan Govender, the #1 Chess Player in South Africa

The Twelve Principles of Animation

There are 12 animation principles, as described by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston in their book, Disney Animations: The Illusion of Life that was created in 1891. In this book, we will cover the 12 principles of animations. What is animations, anyway? Well, animation’s biggest use is for entertainment. They occupy children and keep them entertained. Animation gives life to the character that would not exist in real life.

Animations communicate with the audience in an affected way. The word “ANIMATE” comes from the Latin verb “ANIMARE” which means to make alive or to fill with breath. Animations are a rapid display of sequence of images to create an illusion of movement. The most common method of presenting animations is as a motion picture or video program.

Squash and Stretch

If you drop a ball from a certain height, it would start falling slowly, then it would gradually fall faster until it hits the ground. If the ball is a bouncy ball, you would have to add a “squash and stretch” principle. If you see the sketch of a ball bouncing on the next page, look at when it falls onto the ground. See the ball getting squished? That is the “squash and stretch” principle. You can experiment with it at home, just get your phone and switch the camera mode to “video” and set

it to “slow-mo”. You should see the ball squish when it hits the ground. You can also find the principle when a character’s face is changing into a different emotion or turning his or hers head. The squash and stretch effect is used to exaggerate the speed, mass, weight and momentum of these objects or characters.

Anticipation

Anticipation is used when a character prepares to do an action to give the audience a clue to what will happen next. It also gives the character more energy to look more realistic. In real life, if you want to jump really high, you wouldn't just jump, right? You would have to prepare it by crouching down and then jump. If there is no anticipation, the energy to do that action will come out of nowhere, making it very unrealistic and making a very small and weak jump. It also communicates to the

viewer that he or she is about to do that action. You have to make it really obvious that he or she is about to do something. It is also crucial to make the audience understand what's going on by using anticipation easily.

Staging

This principle can apply to lots of areas of animation such as camera angle, timing, position, acting and setting. When creating a animation, you want to have control on what the audience is looking at. So all of the people and objects work together to move the audience's eyes from one place to another through staging. Staging should have timing; it can't have ten things going on at once: the audience's eyes don't know what to look at, so you have to let an action finish

before the other action starts. Sometimes you have to pause the animation for a short time so the viewer could process what's going on. Or if you have some text in the animation, you should zoom in on it so it can be clearly viewed. You should keep it on the screen for as long as saying the text three times. You also want the viewer to feel the same type of feeling as the character on stage, so if your character is happy, you should exaggerate the happiness so the viewer could clearly see that the character's happy.

Straight Ahead & Pose to Pose

This principle is to describe two ways to animate: The first one is straight ahead, which means that you draw the frames as you go, so you draw the first drawing, then the second, and then the third. The second method, pose to pose, is that you first draw the beginning, middle and end frames. Then you fill in the frames in-between. Pose to pose is commonly better for drawings, as it gives you more control for the

animation. You would know where to start and where to end, and if you use straight ahead, on the other hand, you would have no idea where the frames would finish. Also using straight ahead might head to the characters changing size, where as pose to pose will keep the size under control. There are benefits for the straight ahead method. The straight ahead method is good for animations that are unpredictable, such as fire burning or water falling.

Follow Through & Overlapping Action

This is about body parts or other objects attached to the body. They keeps moving even when the body stops. Follow through, overlapping action and drag are basically describing different aspects of the same thing. When the main object moves, the appendages should be the last to catch up, and when the main body stops, the appendage should go the furthest before going back.

Slow In & Slow Out

This method is the same one as the ball described in the Squash and Stretch effect. Basically, all movement starts slow, speeds up and slows down. This plays a huge role in making things look lifelike, without this, everything will look mechanical and like a robot, moving at the same pace. For example, if you want a fall to drop in your animation, you need to start it slow and then it speeds up, just like in real life, and then falls. Or if you turn your head, your head will turn slowly at first, then becomes faster and then slows down. Cars and other

things do the same thing, too. You can test this if you want by rolling a ball or dropping it. This principle is one of the easiest ones to animate, because you can just create more frames on the start and end, and less frames in the middle.

Arc

An ark is a circular path which most living things do it. Imagine you need to fill in the frames in between the beginning, middle and end of a ball bounce. If you do it straight, it will look unrealistic so you need to form an ark. We can make an ark by changing the x value the same, but making the y value slow in and slow out, like of like the Slow in & Slow out principle. Arcs can be used to create more character by using it in almost any type of movement. Using arcs can solve some typical mistakes, like size mistakes.

Example of an ark: Turning your head and creating a arc is better than turning your head straight