Skip to main content

Animation: Introduction to the 12 Principles

As I'm going through my character animation course, I wanted to use this blog to share some of the things I'm learning. To establish a foundation for those future posts I think it's important to start with the 12 animation principles established by the early animators at the Disney studio.



These principles are both technical philosophies and terminology that help animators speak to specific aspects of a piece of animation that are working and/or needing work. When used together the principles can help any animation be perceived as more harmonious and believable. While they are listed as separate pieces many overlap and inform the others.

Recently, I heard Mark Oftedal put these principles into categories that I found very helpful. Group #1: MOTION - Squash & Stretch, Anticipation, Follow Through, Slow-In & Slow-Out, Arcs, Secondary Action, Timing & Spacing; Group #2: TECHNIQUE - Solid Drawing, Pose-To-Pose & Straight Ahead; Group #3: AESTHETIC - Staging, Exaggeration, Appeal. The reason I found these categories so helpful is that it helped to further validate my "round about" path to animation. I sometimes hear the idea that if you want to do something you should only do that thing. While there may be some truth to that, I have found the concepts and skills I learned from my 2D design and illustration classes making a huge impact on my 3D animation work. Those years not animating were not a waste of time at all, and seeing the principles categorized in this way helped me see why those skills are informing my animation work.

I plan to dive deeper into a few of the principles from the motion category by sharing what I'm learning and show some examples. I'm going to start with a big one, Timing & Spacing. Until then I hope you enjoyed learning or at least reviewing these principles.

p.s. If you liked the shirt pictured above it's a design I created and they are available through TeeSpring.com
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Timing and Spacing Part 1: The Basics

For my posts discussing the 12 Principles of Animation, I want to begin with Timing and Spacing because I feel that this principle is a major building block of the art form. This principle has a lot of power in establishing the style of a shot as well as what will be exaggerated and highlighted. It is also a principle that can be a bit confusing at times. For example, I'm calling the principle "timing AND spacing" while it has also been called simply "timing", and I sometimes hear students talking about the "timing feeling off" when it seems like they are trying to call out the spacing. All this to say I feel there's a lot to unpack so I decided to devote two posts to this principle. In this post, I'll define the principle as I think about it and share some basic examples so that in the following post we can dive in a bit deeper but all be on the same page. So, let's define this principle. The first thing to note is that while it is conside...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Other Animation Principles Of Motion: Newton's Laws of Motion

After discussing timing and spacing, I think it's a little easier to see how all of these animation principles really feed off of each other and overlap in many ways. So instead of focusing on them as separate principles, I decided to discuss the remaining motion  principles as a group. They really are artistic definitions of scientific principles, a way for us to discuss and push reality while still basing our animation on realistic physics to ground our work and make it more believable. Starting with reality, we can look at science, then we will define and apply the animation principles. Obviously, I'm not a scientist so I will not try to get too technical, but I think it's helpful to look at the reality of motion. Specifically Newton's 3 Laws of Motion: (1) Every object in a state of uniform motion will remain in that state of motion unless an external force acts on it (objects at rest will stay at rest until another force acts upon it, objects in motion will...
Post a Comment
Read more