Character Animation

Basic animation principles to make character look more realistic and believable for the audience.

Squash and Stretch - defining the hardness and mass of an object by tranforming its shape during an action
Timing and Motion - spacing actions to define the weight and size of objects and the personality of characters
Anticipation - the preparation for an action
Staging - presenting an clear idea
Follow Through and Overlapping Action - the termination of an action and establishing its relationship to the next action
Straight Ahead Action and Pose-to-Pose Action - The two contrasting approaches to the creation of movement
Slow In and Out - the spacing of the in-between frames to achieve subtlety of timing and movement
Arcs - the visual path of action for natural movement
Exaggeration - Accentuating the essence of an idea via the design and the action
Secondary Action - the action of an object resulting from another action
Appeal - creating a design or an action that the audience enjoys watching

More information found HERE

Tricks of Animating Characters with a Computer

KEYFRAMES:

Work down the hierarchy of the model.
Create separate keyframes for the different controls at each level of the hierarchy.
Have a clear idea of the action you want to achieve before you start.
Plan out the action with thumbnail sketches and plot timing ideas on an exposure sheet.

WEIGHT & SIZE:

Think of how you want your character look like, when it is in motion

Think about timing of the movement of an object as it defines the weight of that object.

Than animating think of how the object behaves in real life. (ex: Heavy objects move slower than light ones)

THE THINKING CHARACTER:

Every action must exist for a reason
Connect character actions + hes thought process.

Walt Disney said, "In most instances, the driving forces behind the action is the mood, the personality, the attitude of the character—or all three. Therefore, the mind is the pilot. We think of things before the body does them."

To convey the idea that the thoughts of a character are driving its actions, a simple trick is in the anticipation; always lead with the eyes or the head. First you would move:

Eyes (few frames before head)->Head->Body->Main action

Think first before you do action.

Understand character's thought process and how long it takes.

The only time that the eyes or head would not lead the action would be when an external force is driving the character’s movements, as opposed to his thought process.

ex:if that character was hit in the back by someone the force of the impact would cause the body to move first, snapping the head back and dragging it behind the main action of the body.

MOVING HOLDS

Instead of having every part of the character stop, have some part continue to move slightly in the same direction, like an arm, a head, or even have the whole body.

Even the slightest movement will keep your character alive.

The motion should match the design of the character and the world.

EMOTION

A character would not do a particular action the same way in two different emotional states.

ex: if a character is happy, the timing of his movements will be faster. Conversely, when sadness is upon the character, the movements will be slower.

To make a character’s personality seem real to an audience, he must be different than the other characters on the screen.

Discover the personalities of your characters through contrast of movement.

No two characters would do the same action in the same way.

READABILITY OF ACTIONS

Proper timing.

Make sure the audience can follow what is happening.

The action must not be so fast that the audience cannot read it and understand the meaning of it.

Make sure only one idea is seen by the audience at a time.

Each idea or action must be timed and staged in the strongest and simplest way before going on to the next idea or action.

"The animator is saying, in effect, "Look at this, now look at this, and now look at this.""

In most cases, don't stop action completely before starting another action; the second action should overlap the first. This slight overlapping maintains a flow and continuity between whole phrases of actions.

A STORY TRICK

Time the ideas and actions, so the audience’s understand the story at any point in time.

Keep the audience guessing about what will happen next in the story.
Time animation to stay either slightly ahead of the audience’s understanding of what’s going on with the story, or slightly behind. It makes the story much more interesting than staying even with the audience.

ASK WHY

In every step of the production of your animation, the story, the design, the staging, the animation, the editing, the lighting, the sound, etc., ask yourself why? Why is this here? Does it further the story? Does it support the whole?

To create successful animation, you must understand why an object moves before you can figure out how it should move.

Character animation isn’t the fact that an object looks like a character or has a face or hands. Character animation is when an object moves like it is alive, when it looks like it is thinking and all of its movements are generated by its own thought process. It is the change of shape that shows that a character is thinking. It is the thinking that gives the illusion of life. It is the life that gives meaning to the expression. As Saint-Exupéry wrote, “It’s not the eyes, but the glance - not the lips, but the smile...”