#as2023

[md-drawz]

straight ahead and pose-to-pose

[could not find a fun relevant gif </3]

Straight ahead and pose to pose are two different methods of animating.

Animating straight ahead is essentially just animating as you go - drawing the first frame, then the second frame, then the third, etc etc. This method is more beneficial when animating movements that are unpredictable, like flames or explosions, which are much harder to plan out using pose to pose. Straight ahead animation also works better for overlapping actions like hair movement. For example, when I was working on my character head turn, I animated her body using pose to pose, then went back in and animated her ponytail using the straight ahead method, as it was easier to focus on how the hair would move separately from the rest of her body while still follow the action of her head turning.

Animating pose to pose involves drawing keyframes like the beginning and end of a movement, then filling in the frames in between. This method allows more control over the actions, as the keyframes give a pretty good indication of what the final animation will look like. It's easier to determine how an action will end and then work backwards to create smooth movements. It also allows for more consistency when it comes to the scale of objects or characters, as the scale can change easily when animating straight ahead. (That happened to me while I was working on the bouncing ball project)

[md-drawz]

Norman McLaren

Norman McLaren was a Scottish Canadian animator (1914-1987), director and producer, primarily known for his work for the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). He is remembered for pioneering a number of areas of animation and filmmaking, including hand-drawn animation, drawn-on-film animation, pixilation and his development of groundbreaking techniques for combining and synchronising animation with music/sound.

Since McLaren didn't have access to a camera when he first started animating, his early experimentation was mostly done by scratching and painting on film stock. He then worked for the UK General Post Office (GPO) film unit, where he helped create films. Afterwards, he moved to New York around the beginning of WWII, where a grant from the Solomon Guggenheim Foundation allowed him to work on drawn-on-film animated works. He then moved to Montreal, and was asked to open an animation studio where he could train Canadian animators at the NFB. During his time there, he worked on a variety of projects ranging from animated shorts reminding Canadians to mail their Christmas cards, to maps for Allied war propaganda films.

His most famous piece is the short film Neighbours, which is 8min 6s long and won a variety of awards including an Oscar for Best Documentary. The film has an anti-war message that encourages the audience to love one another rather than to fight each other. McLaren also created the soundtrack for the film by scratching the edge of the film roll. He used this technique to make blobs, lines and triangles which the projector then read as sound.

[md-drawz]

staging

Staging is the animation principle that involves ensuring that each scene is presented clearly so that the audience can understand it easily. This can be applied to many different aspects of animation, including the acting, timing, setting, and positioning of the camera, in order to guide the audience to each action on screen.

The general idea is that the main action of a scene should be clear and simple. If there's too much happening on-screen around it, that takes the audience's attention away, so any unnecessary detail should be avoided. Camera positioning also plays a role here, as wide shots are more effective for large actions while close-up shots are more effective for showing a character's expressions - if you are trying to show that a character is crying, for example, a wide shot would count as bad staging since the tears wouldn't be visible.

Exaggerating other parts of the scene like the characters' acting or the setting's elements can also help to convey certain ideas. This can be done by pushing character poses/facial expressions so that they become more expressive, and including background/foreground elements that emphasise certain ideas (or excluding background/foreground elements that detract from those ideas).

[md-drawz]

Émile Cohl

Émile Cohl was a French caricaturist, cartoonist and animator, 19th-20th century (1857–1938). He has been dubbed “the Father of the Animated Cartoon” and created over 250 films between 1908-1921.

He started out as an apprentice for André Gill, who was a very famous caricaturist at the time. Cohl completed backgrounds for Gill's work, and simultaneously developed his own caricaturist art style inspired by Gill’s (which was based on Fantoche puppetry) as well as imagery inspired by Guignol puppetry. Afterwards, he joined the Incoherents, an artistic group that based its activities around shocking people through absurdism, nightmares and the drawing style of children. Cohl contributed to their exhibits in 1883 and 1884.

Around the end of the 19th century he drifted away from caricature and more towards comic strips and story-telling, and entered the film world not long after that. He is known for having created Fantasmagorie, which is considered to be the first fully animated film. Fantasmagorie is almost 2 minutes long, with a total of 700 drawings animated on twos. Cohl used straight-ahead animation in a stream of consciousness style. He also filmed black lines on white paper, then reversed the negative to make it look like white chalk on a black chalkboard (the “chalk-line effect”). He then followed up Fantasmagorie with Le Cauchemar du fantoche and Un Drame chez les fantoches the same year, which both stuck to the chalk-line style and included stick figure clowns as their protagonists.

Cohl also created the film Clair de Lune Espagnol (also known as the Man in the Moon), in which he pioneered the use of matte photography. This allowed him to combine live action and animation in the same image by adding drawings to each photo frame.

Cohl is also known for creating the Newlyweds, an adaptation of the popular George McManus comic strip and the first animated cartoon series with a regular cast. He was able to animate 13 Newlyweds cartoons in the span of 13 months by using the bare minimum of actual animation - most of the visuals consisted of static backgrounds with dialog balloons appearing above each character's head, in line with the art style used in McManus' comics. He then used stop-motion to animate cut-out figures for any necessary movements. The success of the Newlyweds resulted in an abundance of animated cartoons based on comic strips.

[md-drawz]

Anticipation

Anticipation is the animation principle in which characters are shown to be preparing for an action. Examples of this include winding up for a punch, crouching for a jump, winding up before bursting into a sprint, etc etc. Depending on the complexity of the action, there can be multiple levels of anticipation.

This principle is used to add some realism to the actions. Going back to the examples I just mentioned, those actions require a burst of energy, which is accumulated through a wind up. A punch animated without using anticipation would look weak, and it would feel extremely unrealistic if the person being punched (the punchee, if you will) then got knocked down from that, whereas a punch animated with anticipation implies that the puncher is actually putting some strength behind that action.

Anticipation is also used to communicate to the audience that an action is about to happen. Back to the examples again, animating a wind-up for each of those actions is basically like saying "hey, audience, this thing is about to happen! Look over here!" Or if something is about to happen on screen, a character might look over to a specific spot to guide the audience's gaze. It functions as a visual cue without which the audience might completely miss the action. In the same vein, it can also be used to trick the audience by getting them to focus on one action, while another more important one happens on a different part of the screen. Very sneaky!

Also, I could be wrong about this because I am just going off the top of my head, but I feel like really exaggerated/drawn-out anticipation is more present in older cartoons, especially the ones with really expressive styles (stuff like Tom & Jerry, Oggy and the cockroaches, etc) and is less present in more recent shows? I recently watched Harley Quinn the animated series and while anticipation is used there, it feels like it's really toned down and just there to keep the human movements look realistic rather than to really exaggerate movements. My memory is really bad so I could be way off but that's a fun bonus thought I had.

[md-drawz]

Caroline Leaf

Caroline Leaf is a Canadian-American animator, director and filmmaker who started studying animation in the late 1960s. She is most known for animated shorts created through sand animation, rather than traditional hand drawn 2D animation. This technique involves straight ahead animation - Leaf would manipulate sand on a light box to draw one frame, photograph it with an overhead camera, then redraw over it, rather than drawing keyframes and then drawing the in-betweens. She also developed the animation techniques of painting on glass, in which slow-drying paints like oils or gouache mixed with glycerine are manipulated on sheets of glass, and hand etching on film stock.

The animation techniques she employed all allowed for expressive and fluid animations with a strong sense of movement. This resulted in projects that focus on emotional content and storytelling. Due to the hands-on nature of her techniques, the majority of her animated projects were solo work - Leaf worked not only as an animator, but also as the director, designer and scriptwriter for her projects.

[md-drawz]

Squash and Stretch

Squash and stretch is an animation principle that involves distorting shapes to emphasise their movement and physical properties. The distortions include squashing (or flattening) and stretching (or elongating) objects in ways that convey their speed, momentum, weight and mass. This is generally applied to both characters and inanimate objects to bring a sense of life to the animation.

A basic example in which this principle is used is the bouncing ball exercise. When the ball comes in contact with the ground, a squash pose is applied, while stretch poses are present right before and after that contact. The amount of squash and stretch applied to the ball emphasises the movement - more exaggerated distortions suggest more momentum to the fall and bounce. However, this principle also works to convey the material of the ball - more squash and stretch suggest that the ball is more elastic/rubbery, while little squash and stretch indicate that the material is firm.

S&S can be overdone if the distortions are pushed so far that the object being distorted starts to lose credibility (ie: if the character ends up looking off-model). When using this principle, it’s important to ensure that the extreme poses aren’t visible for long when the animation plays back - it should be felt rather than seen. Another thing to keep in mind while using squash and stretch is that the object being distorted should maintain approximately the same volume throughout - it shouldn't look like the size and mass of the object vary too drastically over the course of the movement.