Welcome to your first lesson, learning about one  of the principles of animation. But before we begin, I wanted  to give a little disclaimer about these principles. I've said before, you know,  these aren't the only things you need to learn to be able  to animate animation. Why I love it is because it's a never ending process  of learning, but these are  the things you need to start with. It would be like a chef who has, is trying to cook something  but doesn't know what the ingredients are or,  and has never tasted them. So imagine these 12 principles as like new ingredients  that you've never tasted.

So it may seem overly simple  that we're breaking them down so much. Um, but that's part of it. You know, it, it's like tasting each  flavor of an ingredient. So you know how when they combine  what they're all gonna taste like, so that's  what this is like, and making sure  before we start combining things  that we understand each element on their own. So let's get started learning our first animation principle  called Squash and Stretch. And it's a very playful  and one of my favorite principles of animation  because it adds so much life to any animation,  but it's exactly as it sounds.

It is the squash  or the compression of an object under stress  or on an impact. And it is the converse of that, the stretch  or the lengthening of an object into its extreme pose. And that yin  and yang of an object is what we find in nature. It's how our bodies work. It's how our muscles work. They contract and they relax, you know, they compress  and they expand and stretch.

You can also see it on a macro and a micro level. So you could see squash  and stretch on a macro level  of the entire silhouette of something changing. So it's very obvious. And then you could see something on a  micro level squash  and stretch, like just the blinking of an eye  or chewing of food  and how the, the face even squashes and stretches. And then, you know, again, on the macro level,  if someone jumps, they compress down before they jump up. And so you have this squash  and stretch that you can see kind of at every level, um,  once you start looking for it.

So the most important aspect of achieving the proper squash  and stretch on something is to maintain volume. All right? That's the key. And I have this water balloon here, um,  to help demonstrate that. So when I squash this water balloon down,  the volume stays the same  as when I stretch it out, right? There's no more  or less water between either of these two poses  of this water balloon.

It's kind of fun. So no matter what it's doing, the volume,  the wa amount of water in it stays the same. And that should be true of your drawings  or whatever medium of animation you're using,  because that will help sell the effect more  because we don't want something to be, you know,  unless it's like the Hulk or something, um, changing, being  Sized too rapidly Because it'll catch our eye not  as a charming quality, but as an error. And because we're not used  to seeing like things change volume quickly, um, we're used  to things having a volume  and keeping them throughout their range of motion. So that's a principle. It can be broken of course,  but we are talking about sticking  to the principles right now so that we understand,  understand them, and we know when we can break them  that we are breaking them and it's not by accident  and we're making a mistake.

It's going to catch the viewer's eye in a way  that we don't want it to, that'll be distracting. We don't want to distract, we want  to bring them into our animation. So that's why we need to learn these principles. So we understand the rationale when someone's watching  something we've made, that they're focused on  what we want them to be focused on. And they're not being distracted by mistakes  or errors that they can't articulate. They might not know, Hey, the volume changed too much here.

Um, when you squashed  and stretched the water balloon, you know, those types  of things is what you need to know as an animator  to achieve appealing animation. And it may seem obvious, this may seem like an obvious  thing, like, no, duh, I'm not putting water in  or taking it out when I do this. But you know, when we try to translate that into drawing,  like over a long period of time, you're doing mini drawings  and animation, say it's a hundred frames over time,  if you're doing a lot of bouncing and squashing  and stretching, you can kind of lose track of  what the original volume was when you're having  to hand draw on the silhouette all the time. And so just to think about that when you're, you know,  approaching your own animations,  and that can hold true for 3D as well. It's a little easier than 3D  because you can type in the actual numbers of what you want  to scale or squash and stretch it to. So here's an example using Maya.

It's a 3D software that's used in the animation industry. It's name a movie that you like, or a video game you like. And probably Maya has been used on it. I've been using it for my entire career,  and I have other classes on it. If you're interested in learning 3D animation or modeling  or rigging or there's a lot of sides to 3D. But so I, I, you don't have to follow along with this,  I just want to show you what it's like in 3D  and how precise you can get to make sure that you're,  you know, maintaining your volumes.

So let's take a look at that real quick. So here we are in Autodesk Maya, and if I want to squash  or stretch this sphere, I can type in a specific value  and ensure the opposite axis  of the shape is exactly the opposite of the volume change. That way I know even though the shape change,  the volume is staying the same, just like the water balloon  in drawing, you have to do this visually. So that's why it's important to understand this concept. The most common way to demonstrate the squash  and stretch principle is through one of the most popular  and famous animation exercises in the world. The bouncing ball.

I've animated two bouncing balls, one has squash  and stretch and one doesn't. Can you tell which one does? So now that you've had a chance to look at these,  is it the left or the right? I'm pretty sure you can tell it's the right,  even though the squash  and stretch is only occurring over three frames  or about one 10th of a second, you can tell a difference. So that can show you too how little frames can make a  huge difference. So the same is true of the amount of squash and stretch.

In that example, I was only squashing  the sphere from a scale of one to 0.8. So that's a change of only 20%,  and that is still very noticeable,  even only over just three  frames, you could tell a difference. So one of the tendencies  of once you start learning these principles is  to go overboard with them and really exaggerate them. And that can be fun. But I just wanted  to show you a very subtle example,  which is still fairly obvious when compared to a sphere  that doesn't have squash and stretch. So it shows that over just a few frames, one 10th  of a second, and just a 20% difference is a huge difference  in our eyes, even though, you know, you're,  you're not a trained really animator yet.

Or maybe, maybe you are, I don't know. But you can tell that difference just  because you are, you are a pro at this. You, you don't have to know all these animation principles  to be able to tell a difference between things. So I, that's the, the way our audience is going to be too. Now, to be the artist, you have to be able  to control those things to show what you wanna show. But just keep in mind your audience is going to be able  to tell the difference as well, just like you were able  to without bouncing ball.

So let's begin the assignment and exercise. In the next lesson, we are going to use 2D digital animation  with a free online, uh, tool  to animate a little bouncing water ball. So I will see you in the next lesson.