by Lucas David
Animation is like lying to your eyes. Every second, your brain processes a certain number of images and strings them together into a perceived movement. When you make an animation, you create a series of flat images resembling a 3 dimensional object and flash them in front of someone so fast that your brain performs its motion recognition process on the flat images. This creates a powerful illusion that can be entertaining, educational, and expressive.
To make a drawing really feel like a living being, you not only have to create a visually unique and consistent character, but animate it to move like a breathing, seeing, hearing, feeling creature that reacts to its environment even when the viewer might not be paying attention. Unless they are standing unusually still in the scene, they should almost never stop moving completely. Even if the character is standing still, you still want to redraw it each frame, or have enough drawings on a loop to produce a similar effect. Here’s an example of an idle character that still reacts to its environment and does not rest on one drawing:
I find it likely that you, like me, are much more interested in animating an active character than an idle one, which we will explore in more depth next month. Creating a character in the process of performing something more exciting than standing, such as walking, (unheard of, I know), is easy to overcomplicate if you put unnecessary difficulty on yourself. It may appear robotic at first if you aren’t careful. One of the easiest errors for me is to start thinking about the character as a three dimensional object that holds its dimensions when rotated.
This is a mistake because all that matters is what the viewer sees, and they see one angle. Even in 3D animated films, the characters would not look as natural if you turned the camera to view them from a different side. Our eyes see things differently in reality than when we see things on a screen, so the change is necessary and should come naturally as you animate more. This also means there is no need for you to correct it in your animations. In fact, “correcting” your imperfect character drawings will equate to shooting yourself in the foot over time, something I do rather frequently out of perfectionism.
Another tidbit to keep in mind is that no animal moves with perfect smoothness. This means that characters start movements slowly, speed up in the middle and end slowly again. If a movement is constant the whole way through, it causes your animation to look mechanical, and your characters to appear less alive to the viewer. If a piece of animation is feeling difficult to get started or you are having trouble deciding how to represent it, acting it out in front of a camera a few times and watching the recording can help remind your brain what the movement is supposed to look like, and make it easier to get going again.
Animation takes a lot of time and energy, and it’s not difficult to burn yourself out, especially when working on an ongoing project. One way that I avoid burnout is, on a particular day, if I notice I do not feel like animating, I try to assess whether I actually don’t want to animate or if I just need to work on a different part of my project. If I just don’t feel like animating, or feel like working on a short side project for a while, I let myself pursue the whim. You don’t have to force yourself to work on your project every single day, and in doing so you run the risk of turning it into a chore that you feel obligated to complete and find no joy in, which in my personal opinion is worse than quitting.
The last thing I will talk about today is how to manage your time effectively so that you can create more art in the time you have available. The biggest thing to keep in mind, especially in the context of ongoing animations, is that you don’t need it to be perfect, just good enough. Your art is usually better than you think, and NEWS FLASH you are not required to pump out pixar-level animations during your time as a student, or during any time for that matter. If you want to make the most beautiful animations ever, that’s awesome, and you should focus on getting used to spending tens of hours on a few seconds of art. If you’re more interested in the storytelling and narrative aspects, however, it’s helpful to be open to compromising a movement’s quality slightly because the show must go on.
The Lighthouse 