If you’ve just started animating, and not really sure why your animation is not looking great, then you landed on the perfect blog page!

If you take a look at the following, you can see the basic principles of animation: The most important things to keep in mind when animating. You could list the main points and attach them besides you while you animate. All the information has been grabbed from loads of online sites and tried to keep it as simple as possible…

1.Squash and Stretch – The point of squash and stretch is to make the motions larger than life, rather than more swift, realistic, and sometimes unnoticed in passing observation. It is usually used when an object is affected by weight or gravity, and “stretch” (become elongated) when affected by momentum or other forces, in ways that are impossible in reality. A key principle of squash and stretch, however, is the fact that the object/character animated retains the same volume/apparent mass; it’s simply distorted into a different shape and/or configuration to give the impression of the forces acting on it.

2. Anticipation – Anticipation is used to prepare the audience for an action, and to make the action appear more realistic. A dancer jumping off the floor has to bend his knees first; a golfer making a swing has to swing.

3. Staging – Staging directs the audience to the story or idea being told. The importance is to make clear what is important in the scene whether it is an action, expression or mood. This can be the placement of the character within the frame, the use of light and shadow or the angle of the camera.

To begin within the animation there is only one character on screen. The background is plain black in order to draw attention to the action and not confuse with what’s happening on the characters. Each character represents night and day respectively and the way they interact with each other is the main focus of the film.

4. Straight ahead action and pose to pose – These are two different approaches to the actual drawing process. “Straight ahead action” means drawing out a scene frame by frame from beginning to end, while “pose to pose” involves starting with drawing a few key frames, and then filling in the intervals later. “Straight ahead action” creates a more fluid, dynamic illusion of movement, and is better for producing realistic action sequences. On the other hand, it is hard to maintain proportions, and to create exact, convincing poses along the way. “Pose to pose” works better for dramatic or emotional scenes, where composition and relation to the surroundings are of greater importance. A combination of the two techniques is often used.

5. Follow Through and Overlapping Action – These closely related techniques help render movement more realistic, and give the impression that characters follow the laws of physics. “Follow through” means that separate parts of a body will continue moving after the character has stopped. “Overlapping action” is the tendency for parts of the body to move at different rates (an arm will move on different timing of the head and so on). A third technique is “drag”, where a character starts to move and parts of him take a few frames to catch up. These parts can be inanimate objects like clothing or the antenna on a car, or parts of the body, such as arms or hair. On the human body, the torso is the core, with arms, legs, head and hair appendices that normally follow the torso’s movement. Body parts with much tissue, such as large stomachs and breasts, or the loose skin on a dog, are more prone to independent movement than bonier body parts. Again, exaggerated use of the technique can produce a
comical effect, while more realistic animation must time the actions exactly, to produce a convincing result.

Thomas and Johnston also developed the principle of the “moving hold”. A character not in movement can be rendered absolutely still; this is often done, particularly to draw attention to the main action. According to Thomas and Johnston, however, this gave a dull and lifeless result, and should be avoided. Even characters sitting still can display some sort of movement, such as the torso moving in and out with breathing.

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