Did you know ? 🧐
The 12 Animation Principles were once called
“The Illusion Of Life” ?
Or was it?..
► in 1981, Ollie Johnson & Franck Thomas
Two Disney Animators launched their book to share with the world their summary of what they learned working on many animation projects from the 1930 onwards..
A book named: THE iLLUSiON OF LiFE.
A very insightful book that teaches us how to methodically approach traditional hand drawn animation as it was made at that time.
It is funny how everything has evolved since then! From a recent point of view, these days seem peaceful. Compared to the lot of controversy that we are getting nowadays..
Though, even for their era, History tells us that it was a worldwide troublesome era.. ..and.. we’ll talk about that later!
► #THEiLLUSiONOFLiFE
is a book that helps us understand how the motion can be created through drawings made by your hands. Not only that, it also helps us understand what exactly gives more credibility to it.
Ollie and Franck came down to a statement that for you to be able to animate, you need to understand animation and what is made of. In other words, you have to be able to analyze it backward aka to decompose it. And to do so, they provided us an interesting summary of methods and techniques with cute names so that you can remember it:
► The 12 PRiNCiPLES OF ANiMATi0N 😃🔥
(or The 12 Animation Principles, it’s up to you)
— It sounds like a cool gang or secret jutsu in a shōnen manga anime !
🔥🫷🏾😤🫸🏾🔥
Here are each principles:
✍🏾 ► Squash and stretch
✍🏾 ► Anticipation
✍🏾 ► Staging
✍🏾 ► Straight ahead action and pose to pose
✍🏾 ► Follow through and overlapping action
✍🏾 ► Slow in and slow out / Ease iN & Ease Out
✍🏾 ► Arc
✍🏾 ► Secondary Action
✍🏾 ► Timing
✍🏾 ► Exaggeration
✍🏾 ► Solid Drawing
✍🏾 ► Appeal
I personally learned these principles through the teaching of Richard Williams [1957-2019 RiP 🙏🏾], a Canadian Animator from Toronto, Canada, the animation director of Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
He’s much younger than our 2 badboys and I still don’t know if he worked at Disney at some point or not..
BUT
His book was very helpful to get through the 12 PRiNCiPLES with ease.
I have already talked about some of them during my last Instagram live — that you can watch on my YouTube channel if you click here.
But in order to help your learning approach, I will take the time to go with you through each of them, one by one so that you can follow along and also have fun while learning animation.
So basically, these 12 principles are a bunch of laws, artistic and/or scientific observations of what we call motion. It helps understanding what it is made of, how it works but also, what we can get when we mix it with our human behavior.
That’s character animation for y’all ! 😎
Since the origin is 2D drawing, following the principles will give us 2D animation.
And of course, once studied and understood, you can apply them to other current mediums such as 3D character animation (a very close relative though!), stop motion, motion designs, etc..
And.. that’s it for today!
► Stay tuned and buckle up! We’re in it for a long rollercoaster!! 🎢
N.B.: funny enough, #Japanimation seemed to also follow these Western principles.. 🤨
Tell me,
which animation principles are you the most curious about ?
Cheers!
•• AM² •• - Animation with simple words.
#12animationprinciples #the12principlesofanimation #learnanimation
#amm #animangamagic #animationmangamagic #learnanime
images are from rotoscopers.com
