Mechanic of Motion (basic)

This is the reference for our 3d model later on.

            The 12 principles of animation is very important as it is the very base of the previous generation of animators that only depends on hand-drawn animation to create their masterpiece. These principles also make our animation looks more lively and fascinating for the eyes to see instead of it being flat and boring. These principles later on influenced us on the practical use of animation rather than entertainment purposes only. These days, we could see animation being displayed everywhere, not just on television, but also in our smartphone and other important digital appliances that we often use in our daily life. For example, we could see animation of a moving word on the digital billboard, an animated advertisement, or object that usually appear before opening a program, animated transitions, and many more. If these principles of animation does not exist, all of the animation that was made would look generic and cheaply produced.

            Therefore, we created a videos that had applied a few of important principles of animation such as squash and stretch, anticipation, staging, follow through, secondary action, timing and arc.  

ANALYSIS

Indication:
Character one refers to the actor in black shirt.

Character two refers to the actor in black shirt with blue stripe.

Sneakily Walking and Peeking through the Door

            First and foremost, we will talk about the opening scene, which is character one walking to the door. Based on this scene only, we can detect several different principles being applied. The first one is secondary action. We can confirm this by looking at character one’s hand and leg gesture when he walks. The next principle that we can see in this scene is exaggeration. The way character one moves is exaggerated to gives more impact towards the action that is being done. We see these principles being used most of the time when watching cartoons as they indicates that he has a mischievous character.

Moving on to the next scene, we can see some of the principle of animation being applied here. Some of it is when character one is pushing the door. Refer to the image below:

            Firstly, in this scene, we could see character one peeking through the door by pushing it slowly. This scene indicates one of the 12 principles of animation which is staging. This scene focus on Character 1 position where he is being place at the right of the camera view which at the doorknob as the left part of the camera view are the rest of the door. From this positioning, the audience could see that character one is trying to peek inside the room.

            Secondly, secondary action was also being applied in this scene where character one’s left hand was being placed at the door. This secondary action support the main action in this scene which is pushing the door where he is being sneaky.

In this scene, we could see character one’s field of view where he is observing character two in a sneaky manner. We could see the principle of staging being applied in this particular scene. Character two is focused at the center part of the camera view as the door part were being blurred and inside the room view was focused in. From this scene, the audience could see that character one is focusing on character two with a bad intention in his mind as character one’s action displays a naughty quirk which will pique the audience interest to watch the next scene.

This scene also displays that the door was opened slowly by character one. The 12 principles of animation that is being applied here in this scene is timing. These scene shows the door moves in a slowly manner to create a mischievous mood and grab the audience attention.

Walking Sneakily in the Room

There are a few principle of animation applied in these scene. The picture below implies to the particular scene for references:                                                         

Firstly, staging is the one of the principles of animation that is included in this shot. Staging basically refers to the camera movement and the object that it wants to focus in. The function of staging is to make the audience focus on the action that is being done.

In this footage, staging happened when character one moves to the bed on the floor. The camera follows the movement of character one. Because the camera only focus on him on this footage, it automatically makes the audience focus on him.

The shot being shown above has follow through as the principle. This principle takes place on character one’s hair. As we can see in the two pictures above, character one’s hair has a certain flow to it. This proves that the movement of the hair has an association with the principle.

Follow through happens when his body moves up, while his hair also does the same, but at a different rate. There is also secondary action being applied in this scene. Secondary action is an action that happened in our life most of the time. For your information, the main action in this shot came from character one’s movement while the secondary action can be seen on his hand and leg. From this scene, when character one walks to the bed, we can guess his character from the gesture of his hand and leg. The secondary action that happens at his hand supports the main action that he is doing.

Jumping on the Mattress Scene

There are some out of the 12 principles of animation being applied in this jumping scene. As we can see from the image below, the character one is ready to jump and this is called anticipation.

Before he jumps, he would bend his knee and bring his body downwards. His eyes also look exactly to the direction he wants to jump. This action prepares the viewer’s for the action that he is about to do. This is the first principle that we could learn from this jumping scene.

The second principle that being applied in this scene is squash and stretch. There are two things that have applied this principle. First thing that we could see is the character one’s body. When he is about to jump, his body would squash to the earth before is stretches into the air. The thing that we can clearly see from the image is the legs. The character one would bend his knee to an angle and straighten his legs back to normal when he stretches his body up.

The second thing that applied this principle from the images above is the bed. The bed would have been squash when the character one steps on it. The second after character one jumps into the air, the bed will stretch itself back into its original shape. Thus, with this principle being applied in this particular scene, it adds the element of realism to the character’s action.

            The third principle that we could learn from the images above or from this jumping scene is follow through. When the character one jumps, we could see his hair moves along with the jumping action. When the character one stops jumping, his hair will also stop, but at a different rate. That’s explained why his hair is the follow through in this jumping scene.

            Not to forget, character one’s hands also a follow through. If we look closely, when character one jumps, his hand would also moves into the air but a bit late. Also, when he started to fall back onto the mattress, his hands would stay at the same position, and slowly moves down after the fall. With this principle being applied in this scene, the jump will look more realistic and less static.

Punching and Falling Scene

In this scene, we can see some of the principle of animation being applied. The first action that will be explained is the punch. Refer to the image below:

In this image, we can see that character two brings his body to the back when preparing for his punches. This act of winding up is categorized in one of the 12 principles, which is anticipation. This principle can prepare the audience for what is going to happen instead of delivering the action right away.

There is also the principle of secondary action being applied in this scene. When anticipating the punch, character two clench his hand into a fist to indicates that a powerful punch is about to be delivered. This also conveys the audience what kind of emotion character two is having, which is anger. When character one gets hit, the way he falls can be said as a secondary action. We can determine that he had been hit with a powerful punch as he falls with such manner.

After character two’s punch hit character one in the face, his body keep moving towards the direction of the punch. This follow up can be grouped into two principle, which is follow through, or overlapping action, and arc.

Before we talk about arc, we will go through the principle of follow through first. Why we can say that this action is considered as follow through is because character two’s body keeps moving even after his action of punch had been done. This is because some part of the body does not stop right away even after the act had been done. This is a natural thing that happens with most of the thing that moves and it also makes the action looks more natural. By stopping the action right away, it will looks more robotic instead.

Next, we will go into the details of arc. Most of our movement always happens in an arc and most of us makes the same pattern of arc with the same movement. By having an arc, the movement that we produced will looks more natural. A movement that is done in a straight arc can only be done by a robot-like being.

With the punching scene done, we will talk about character one’s act of falling next. This act consists of two parts, before the fall, and after.

The principle before character one falls has is follow through. Looking at the picture above, we can see character one’s hair moves a bit late than his head. The hand also stays in the air during the duration of the fall and follows up after the fall.

Before the fall, character one’s took the punch from character two. There is also an arc that we can see from his body movement when he is in his way falling onto the bed. Why we can confirm that his body produces an arc is because he does not fall flat nor in a straight line towards the bed.

After the fall, the principle that we can extract from it is follow through. We can determine this by looking at character one’s legs after he falls onto the bed. His legs bend towards his body resulting from the impact of the fall.

CONCLUSION

            From the analysis based on the video we make, we realize that the 12 principles of animation are very important from many perspective. If we didn’t applied the principle of animation in our video, we realized that our video will be dull and boring to watch. Moreover, we realize that some of these 12 principle of animation needs to follow the law of physic in the term of inertia, speed, velocity and speed which involves the principle of squash and stretch, timing, or slow in and slow out. Plus, we also can tell the differences between mechanical movement and organic movement based on real life experiences. Other than that, we realized that Walt Disney and the staff involved pours all their hard work on passing the technique and understanding of how to create an excellent animation to the next generation so that we can produces something new and phenomenal.

Based on our analysis, we also realize that the 12 principles of animation is very important not only for animated movies but also for live action movies. Without these 12 principle, the animation industry probably would not evolve as it was right now. The animation would not be as impactful and dynamic as it would be if the principle like exaggeration, timing and appeal are not applied by the animators. Not just that, our daily life probably will be affected as well, maybe does not realize it, but animation were revolving around us in many kind of form such as animated word in the digital billboard,  responsive animated tool feedback from an application, well designed transition in software, and many more. Therefore, from the perspective view of a creator, we can conclude that 12 principle of animation is very important for us as we cannot create something exceptional without a good basic. 

Final Outlook :-

For this course, we have made a video where it displays where the principles of animation were applied in our daily life. This video is actually works as a reference for our final project where we need to animate it into an animation in the duration of 30 to 60 seconds. As this video applies various type of principal of animation such as squash and stretch, anticipation, staging, follow through, secondary action, timing and arc, we also need to do the same for our final project.

We do our final project using the standard 3D software for students which is Autodesk Maya. Maya preserves a lot of function for us to use in animating a full character animation such as modelling, rigging, animating, rendering and many more for us to explore. Despite all this function, we discovered that there are many more advanced function for us to use as they were concealed under few of the option box such as extrude, insert edge loop, and many more.

The 3D character that were used in our final is Ultimate Bony version 1.0.5, which is provided by our lecturer, Sir Ezwan, as we are new to the 3D software and it took a lot of time just to model and rig a 3D character of our own. Therefore, our lecturer provided this model and teach us how to move the model based on the assignment given. This Ultimate Bony v1.0.5 was provided with simple layered body parts and controls for us easy to animate. It also display a lot of feature such as the body can squash and stretch, fully scalable and easy to animate with simplified and needed controls.

Content

The course, Mechanic of Motion, also known as FFA231, is where we learned about the basic of human’s movement in real life, or while animating. This movement can be different in case of the timing depending on the reaction that it takes. For example, a strong force will result in a shorter timing, making the reaction quicker.

We started it all by learning about the principles of animation, with there being 12 of them. These principles are important as they can help us produce a quality and accurate animation as it is an interpretation of real-life movement.

Then, we were given the task to apply these principles into our daily life, by making a video about it. We were divided into a group of four to five people, and each was required to make a video of our own choice as to apply these principles. Based on the video, we then have to identify the principle that we had used in the action that we show in it.

Then, we started learning about timing and keyframing, before given a task to animate using a 3D software. We animate a head reacting to different kind of action, with each one having different timing, from slow to a fast reaction.

After that, we learned to animate a cycle of a character walking, running and jumping. This is so that we can get used to the software as each assignment gets more complicated than the one before, in term of the keyframing and movement of the body parts.

Before our final assignment, we were taught about the basic of rendering, so that we can apply it in our final assignment that we are about to do. We learned how to apply lighting, how to handle a camera, and the format to use when rendering a certain project.

Our final assignment is to make an animation based on the video that we had produced before, as to conclude everything that we had learned back in the class. This assignment is to prove our understanding on the use of the animation principle, and keyframing in the software to produce a similar shot to our video.

Conclusion

We managed to finish this assignment with all our effort despite it having the simple look to it. Most of the actions that were involved are animated with accurate movement as we tried to avoid making mistakes such as unrealistic movement, character moving in a dull manner, excessive secondary action for a single main action and many more. Furthermore, we only take about 30 seconds from our original video as it requires a lot of time to animate as it contains a lot of action and will probably exceeds the maximum time limit which is 1 minute if we animate our whole video.

After finish animating the character, we realize that animating can be somewhat depressing and exciting at the same time as we spend almost 3 hours just to animate 10 seconds of our video. It was a heartbreaking moment though when we have to animate the whole scene again as we realize that it doesn’t match exactly with what we imagined in our mind beforehand. After a few efforts of trial and error, we managed to finish our final project and it was quite satisfying despite the minimal secondary action of the character main action.

In a nutshell, we learned that 3D animation are not as easy as we expected it to be as it requires a high specs laptop or computer to run the 3D software, knowledge concerning the 3D software such as Maya or Blender, skills to model an object with keen detail, animation needs the basic principle of animation to make it look lively and patience are needed when rendering the whole animated scene. We can see that despite 3D animation take quite a lot of effort, it is better than 2D animation that needs constant and steady drawing style, a lot of drawing and many more. Therefore, this course has introduces us to most of the process to create basic 3D animation as it will help us for our final year project on our next semester and for working in animation company that involve with 3D animation such as Les’ Copaque Production, Animonsta Studio and many more for our final semester.