Animation for Beginners Course

Assignment 6: Pose to Pose Straight Ahead

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Course info

23 lessons / 4 hours

Overview

The foundation of learning animation is understanding the universal "12 Principles of Animation". In this course you will learn to apply these principles to a range of mediums, including drawing, stop motion, claymation and puppeteering in Adobe After Effects.

You do not need to be able to draw to complete this course! Each lesson is followed by a demonstration and assignment that you can follow Lucas along with by using free online tools and apps, as well as items you'll be able to find laying around your house.

In this course you will learn:
 • The History of the Animation Principles
 • The Science of Animation
 • Squash & Stretch
 • Slow In/Out
 • Anticipation
 • Overlapping Action
 • Secondary Action
 • Arcs
 • Pose to Pose/Straight Ahead
 • Timing
 • Staging
 • Exaggeration
 • Solid Drawing
 • Appeal

During the course our assignments will cover*:
 • Flipbooks
 • Thaumatropes
 • 2D digital animation
 • Animating in Procreate on the iPad
 • Animating in After Effects (project file provided)
 • Stop Motion Animation
 • Claymation
* Each assignment could be completed in any of these mediums so there's no need to have a fancy computer, expensive software, or an iPad.

Lucas will also share his insights working as a professional animator on big movies like Avengers, Ready Player One and how he uses the principles taught in this course every day in his work.

The concepts covered here are not only for beginners but for every animator to apply in their daily work and be a resource for any time you're stuck on how to add more appeal to your animations.

Join Lucas on an epic animation Journey!

Daniel Scott

Daniel Scott

Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor

instructor

I discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.

Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.

Downloads & Exercise files

Transcript

So we're back working on the head turn assignment  with more context of animation principles,  like straight ahead imposed to pose. Now we learned a little bit about what we call these. Now these are basically the story poses or the golden poses. It tells us the overall action in as fewest drawings  or key frames possible. I'm gonna turn off the onion skin for a second  so we can scrub through this  and see we're starting middle end. Now, one of the things  that we discussed quickly was extreme poses.

And the extremes in the case of our assignment is going  to be the overshoots and the anticipation. Because if we're going to anticipate this head turn,  like when we learned about anticipation  and I had the example of a head turn,  we had motion in the opposite direction. So we should be looking  or turning our head this way first  before we go in the opposite direction. It almost looks like it's coming out of his nose. Um, and then, um, on the overshoot  when we get over here, the extreme, the,  the furthest he goes, you know, it's, it's hard  to slow down your head. Like when we overshoot, we can actually go past  where we're trying to stop  because of the weight of our head,  or maybe we don't just have as good a control over  our bodies as we'd hoped.

And um, we go past where we want to and then come back  and settle where this story poses. So now understanding pose to pose, we can apply  those other kind of extreme poses here. So what I'm gonna do to make  that a lot more simple is I'm gonna duplicate these  by just clicking on them  and I'm going to move them with the selection tool  because these are gonna be such slight adjustments. They don't really constitute new drawings when  we're working this roughly. So I'm just going to draw around this  and grab the arrow here  and move this slightly along  where this path is. I don't wanna like go on a straight line across,  then you can see where under this, um,  left pupil that wouldn't make sense.

We need to follow this arc around, right? So we gonna stay in line with that at least. And that's basically gonna be going to be the anticipation. It doesn't really even need to be that much, right? So it's just a little bit  and then we can move the ear as well. So I'm moving these separately  because things on a sphere move differently.

If, if um, you know,  this moves a lot quicker than my ear does  because there's a lot more distance relative to,  to the camera's view than the ear moving back in space. You're gonna kind of keep seeing it. So this will have maybe a little more distance to move. I don't wanna scale it so I need  to zoom in here, I'll do that. And then now drag this over just a bit,  maybe just a tiny bit more than the face  because the face was already on the edge of our kind of,  uh, silhouette of the head. So it's just little things like that to help sell the effect  that this is a three-dimensional head.

So now we have the anticipation  and if you end up putting the frame in the wrong place,  you can just click and drag them around  and place them where you need to. But we have that where we want,  we are gonna rotate the head over here  and then we are going to move down around. So if I play that back, it's going way too fast. So a way that we can adjust that,  we actually adjust it while it's playing back just  to get a sense of the timing, is we can drag the,  the frames per second way down. So maybe let's do like, yeah, two or three  and then we can just kind of get a sense of even just with  as few poses as we have, What that's like. The other way we can kind  of test the sound at this early stage is to do held poses.

So what I could do is, and it also will help us start  to figure out the timing, but, and so that's  for a bit later, but we could hold the duration  of these frames and we'll put these grade frames in here so  that we can have a bit of a better understanding of  how this is gonna go. Maybe I'll just do one frame here  because that's gonna be the fastest motion  and then we can play that back. So now we're getting a be a better sense of,  of the timing even with just four frames. I mean that's why I love animation, like  what you can get away with, uh, when you're animating. So now that we've done this, let's create the overshoot. So we have the end story pose here.

I'm just gonna bring all these back down to uh, none so  that we don't get confused on what we're doing here. We're gonna revisit the timing later. And I'm just gonna make the overshoot basically do the  opposite, the, that we just did select this stuff  and then move it over just a touch. Now the other thing to take into account, well first I need  to make the duplicate frame. I don't wanna be working on this one When I go back  to this frame because this is gonna be  where the overshoot is right here, right? We're not, this is the end pose.

We're gonna end here. So we need to overshoot that here in this pose. We're gonna go past it. The other thing to think about when you're doing an  overshoot is maybe offsetting stuff. Maybe the mouth is still catching up. So maybe the overshoot isn't the whole, all the features  of the, of the face, maybe the mouth itself.

And let's just turn on onion  skinning so we can see this a bit better. Maybe the mouth itself and, and the secondary. So we can see the colors here. Maybe the mouth itself is catching up  so we can actually move this back in another direction here  and go back here or just even redraw this  'cause it's such a, it's just a line here. It's not get too lazy. Even though we're working very, uh, easily  with digital stuff here.

So maybe the mouth is, you know, dragging  behind the other features of the face. And then these features have gone past  an overshot where they're going to end. So once we move that, we can see the green beneath it,  what we're actually doing here. You know, you could even add a little rotation here if you  wanted, but that's essentially the idea. I'm gonna revisit now that we have the onion skin on  first frame here. We can see the ear is a lot more.

We need to, you know, also go back and do this for the ear  before we get ahead of ourselves here. This, this, this one would follow the features of the face,  um, a bit more than the mouth. They're not gonna drag as much. I mean maybe the, if you have really  floppy ears, maybe they would. So let's go to the overshoot here. And the other thing that we could maybe indicate is  that we're gonna have a blink  because we have the middle blink here.

Maybe he's already starting to blink, so we could maybe  add in the half lid here on the anticipation that he's about  to start uh, blinking. And you know, same thing with the overshoot,  and this is why I like animation. You can change your mind, go back, mess with stuff. Maybe we do want the mouth in the same place. Maybe it just changes shape. Maybe he, it's more of a half moon kind of a thing.

So learning pose to pose and straight ahead. We understand the value of being able  to plan our animation like this  and not having to determine from frame one exactly  how we're gonna do the extremes,  which is what we just put in. We put in the extreme poses here  'cause that's indicates the furthest that the head goes  on this animation. So let's just take a look real quick at two frames a second  and we can kind of get a sense of  what the animation's gonna look like  as we continue to flesh this out. And hopefully you'll be impressed by  how far we can take this in the next time we touch this. So let's learn a little bit about timing now in the next  lesson, which is really going to help cap off the knowledge  that we need to finish this animation.

Thanks for watching LLC there.
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