Screenings:
Cento Lodigiani: Full Animation & GIF gallery Katarzyna Gorska
Articles:
Principles of Animation, as they apply to Motion Design–in order of importance.
1. Appeal: What is compelling our viewers to watch our work? Keep things moving, sure, but keep the movements meaningful and delightful to watch. Try adding animated flourishes with Shape Layers, or playing with your timing, using different kinds of keyframes, or adding sound effects.
Repeater Tutorial: EC Abrams Keyframe essentials article: Austin Saylor
2. Staging: Composition–and using foreground and background cues to create the illusion of depth, but also creating a pleasing composition that viewers want to look at. Studying photography can help here. When animating with 3D layers, this is one of the hardest things to maintain, so plugins like Video Copilot’s SureTarget2 help a lot. Camera Angles article: NY Film Academy
3. Eye-trace: guide your viewer’s eye around the scene and edit, through composition and well-directed movement. Example: Are you On it? Soundcloud, Arena Tutorial (based on Video Editing): Story Greenlight Article (based on Cinematography/Editing): Herbert Heinsche
4. Timing vs. Spacing: Timing is the amount of TIME between keyframes. Spacing is how you’re getting from 1 keyframe to the next–what’s happening between the keyframes in terms of speed? Graphs help here too. Tutorial on what’s the difference: Digital Tutors
5. Slow In and Slow Out: these are your Easy Eases! Use those Value and Speed Graphs in AE to create dynamic movement instead of using the default eases. Example: Google Fi Articles: Motion Island, Austin Saylor Graph Editors and Keyframes Tutorial: EC Abrams
6. Solid Drawing: What are the characteristics of your layer? Heavy/Light, Soft/Hard, Squishy/Solid, Little/Big, and what surface is it landing on? What’s the gravity of the space surrounding it? These considerations will help make your graphics feel REAL. Graph Editors help here, as do AE effects and integrating footage, hand-drawn elements and sound. Tutorial: Smoky text reveal, Fire text, Hand-drawn elements in Adobe Animate Free footage downloads: ActionVFX, DetonationFilms Sound effects: FreeSound
7. Exaggeration: Make movements BIGGER and SMALLER, FASTER and SLOWER, in pronounced ways. Example: Brown Bag Films
8. Squash and Stretch: You don’t have to use squash and stretch, but if something is supposed to be squishy, you can and you should! Remember you want to keep the same volume to the thing you’re squashing and stretching. Simple Scale Squishing tutorial: Kalika Bouncing Ball Tutorial: School of Motion
9. Anticipation: movement in the opposite direction of a major move–a breath in, before a giant, huffing exhale, for example. Anticipation with Position and Scale Tutorial: Motifize
10. Secondary Action: a little extra detail, that animates separately from the rest. Like the “dot” of a letter i that pops in at the end, an animated flourish (hand drawn or with Shape Layers) Example: Brown Bag Films Example & Tutorial: Feis Reiling
11. Follow Through and Overlapping Action: actions don’t exist in a vacuum, and objects always have a little bit of something that lags behind the rest. Think of a girl running with her ponytail wagging behind her. Example: Michiel Meilink Tutorial: School of Motion Tutorial on Soft Body Dynamics in AE: EC Abrams
12. Straight Ahead Action and Pose to Pose: you can animate randomly, or with a plan in mind. Or do it randomly, and take cues from the random test for your storyboard! But nothing beats a plan. Learn about the Animation Process from EC Abrams.
13. Arcs: things in real life, move in arcs. Try to bring curvature into your motion design work. Animate along a Path Tutorial: Adobe Help, Kalika tutorial
14. Balance & Weight: Make things feel heavy and light by playing with balance, weight, and all those physical physics things you can watch with your eyes, and can translate to your animations. Squash and Stretch and your Graph Editors, can help here.
15. Depth: play with perceived distance to camera. You don’t have to use 3D layers to do it, just think of perspective drawing! Things closer to camera are going to be bigger, pushed out to the sides, and probably blurrier, than things further from camera that are in the distance. Or you can use the 3D Camera’s Depth of Field.