Animation Practice?

[Azuyre]

So, I'm looking for some ways to practice animation, I have some experience but my animations tend to end up looking a little stiff and I want to try and improve.

What I'm wondering is if anyone happens to know of any good animation exercises, maybe something from school or something online, or even just a random idea you might have. When I'm trying to learn something I do better when I have guidelines to follow, I've been trying to just come up with random small animations for practice but since I don't really have any specific goal in mind I always end up over thinking things and not making a decision on what to do.

When I was in school my teachers didn't touch on 2D animation a whole lot since my degree focused on 3D, I've since moved on to 2D and while some things carry over it hasn't been enough to help me get started. I've seen a lot of professional animators talk about animating a sack of flour since its simple and you can have it display a lot of emotion through it's movement. I think if I just had some simple exercises that say "animate this object" with a few guidelines it would help me get started.

I'm referring to 2D animation in general by the way, from what I've heard it seems like I should try to just learn animation in general before focusing on the pixel art aspect of it.

Besides just exercises and things like that maybe some of you could tell me what you did to learn and how you practice animation? Any help would be appreciated.

[Mr. Fahrenheit]

I'm not an animation expert, *cough cough* pixelpiledriver *cough cough*, but definitely try animating a bouncing ball with squash and stretch and also do the flour sack exercise where you through a sack of flour into the air and let it smack the ground. You try to show the weight in that animation mainly, along with all the other principles.

[Azuyre]

Thanks, those two sound like good ones, I tried the squash/stretch ball a long time ago in Flash but it never occurred to me to try it with pixel art so that should be an interesting exercise.

Also, I had heard a lot about animating the flour sack but not exactly what you might animate it doing so that's good to know.

I think I'll start on those and see what I can come up with.

[PixelPiledriver]

Yo.

I've also been wanting to do animation exercises.
A few weeks ago I did some balls and have been trying to keep up on doing more every few days.
Here's some stuff.


Like I PMed you, still working on typing something up that's organized and explains the point of each test and things you might try.
There are a few exercises before the bouncing ball and flour sack.
But go ahead and just draw stuff, it's not a bad place to start.

do the flour sack exercise where you through a sack of flour into the air and let it smack the ground.

Also, I had heard a lot about animating the flour sack but not exactly what you might animate it doing so that's good to know.

Yah the flour sack exercise does not have to be about acting and emotion.
Alot of times people will bring it to life and make it do something funny.
But don't feel like you need to start there.
Really you should do each exercise multiple times, and a few simple animations with a character are good steps for putting them into something more complicated.
You'll notice that the motion design I did for my sack is really simple and stupid. 
He just leans over and then stomps.
There's also many different ways to design the flour sack.
I made him really short and fat/full, but he can also be much thinner, less full, taller, longer ears/arms, etc, so play around with different designs.

I'm not an animation expert, *cough cough* pixelpiledriver *cough cough*

Thanks but not really true.
I don't practice enough.
But trying to get more in the habit cuz it's fun.

[Azuyre]

Yo.

I've also been wanting to do animation exercises.
A few weeks ago I did some balls and have been trying to keep up on doing more every few days.

Cool, I guess I caught at a good time!

Like I PMed you, still working on typing something up that's organized and explains the point of each test and things you might try.
There are a few exercises before the bouncing ball and flour sack.
But go ahead and just draw stuff, it's not a bad place to start.

I'm looking forward to your post, I've seen a lot of your tips around the forums and they always help when I'm trying to figure something out.

Yah the flour sack exercise does not have to be about acting and emotion.
Alot of times people will bring it to life and make it do something funny.
But don't feel like you need to start there.
Really you should do each exercise multiple times, and a few simple animations with a character are good steps for putting them into something more complicated.
You'll notice that the motion design I did for my sack is really simple and stupid. 
He just leans over and then stomps.

Yeah, I can see how animating the flour sack can help a lot with weight, most of the ones I had seen were like yours with one being alive and doing something so I wasn't sure if there was more to it.

I tried a character animation a while back but its kinda basic and doesn't really have a lot of actual "character" to it.


I basically followed along with a tutorial on simple walk cycles, though it took me a lot longer then I expected. I really like the types of walk cycles that tell you about a character and have a lot of emotion and weight so I'm looking forward to working towards that eventually. But before that I need to focus on the basics so I'm hoping that doing these exercises can help.

Edit:
I tried doing a simple pixel version of the bouncing ball to see how it would come out:

[PixelPiledriver]

Here's some of the exercises I was given in Ani 101.
Keep in mind these are coming from a class designed to teach pencil film animation.
But they are still completely relevant for learning animation.
Feel free to alter them if you like.
No you don't have to use pencil and paper. ---> altho it is quite a nice medium, I'd say at least try it someday
I've tried to put them in order as they were given to me.
But you could also jump around a bit.

Here is all the exercises I will try to cover --------> list may change
Spoiler

------------------
- 12 Principles
- Inbetween
- Bouncing Ball
- Flour Sack
- Walk Cycle, Side, Front, Back
- Eccentric Walk Cycle
- Run Cycle
- Jump
- Fall
- Lift
- Fire
- Water Splash
- Facial Expressions
- Dialog Hands / Eyes
- Dialog Mouth / Phonemes
- Bar Drink
- Flaming Objects
- Falling Objects
- Perspective Loop
- 2 tone lighting

The 12 Principles of Animation

The starting point for understanding animation.
Altho I don't really agree. 
Read thru each one and give it some thought, maybe do a few drawings.
But treat this as an overview of stuff you will use in the future.
There's no need to memorize it.
You will come back to this list over and over later.

What you should learn:
Spoiler

A list of 12 combined theories that will help you with animation.

Links:
Spoiler

Honestly I don't have a great link for this.
I learned animation from people, not books, so it's hard for me to recommend any single source.

Free:
http://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse459/13au/exercises/animation_principles.html ------> This is pretty good actually. But it does not cover all of them.
http://minyos.its.rmit.edu.au/~rpyjp/a_notes/anim_principles.html
http://www.animationtoolworks.com/library/article9.html
Not Free:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Animators-Survival-Kit--Revised-Edition/dp/086547897X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1389996648&sr=8-1&keywords=animators+survival+kit
http://www.amazon.com/The-Animators-Workbook-Step-By-Step-Techniques/dp/0823002292/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1389996528&sr=8-1&keywords=animators+workbook

Use google to find more.
Do not use just 1 source for these.

Exercise:
Spoiler

Read the information.
Think about stuff.
Draw stuff.

Things you might try
Spoiler

Do some sketches to help you understand each principle.
After doing some of the other exercises come back to these and do animations to study each one.

Other
Spoiler

This was the first day/week of class.
We didn't draw or do any exercises on the light table.
Just lectures, notes, and sketches.

It seems like everywhere I look there are slight/drastic variations on the definitions of these.
Here's an example.

1."Follow through means that separate parts of a body will continue moving after the character has stopped."

2."Follow through: When the main body of the character stops all other parts continue to catch up to the main mass of the character, such as arms, long hair, clothing, coat tails or a dress, floppy ears or a long tail (these follow the path of action)."

3."Follow-through refers to the reactive animation that occurs after an action is completed, telling the audience how the character feels about that action. (Think of Donald Duck throwing a football, watching it for a moment, and then lowering his arm in disappointment.)"

It's not that they are wrong, altho to me some not so good, misleading, or about a completely separate topic, there are just different ways of explaining and defining animation theories.
Animation terms and thoughts are flexible and I think that when you learn them you end up describing them as you understand them on a personal level.
And for some reason some of the principles differ much more than the others.
Also there are many places that explain them well but then have very few, odd, or no examples.
Because of this I recommend that you read MANY different sources of the 12 principles and give them some thought.
At some point I will do my own version of the 12.

Also I find the list of 12 to be very incomplete.
I would probly add about 40 more, but then I guess it wouldn't be a very pretty list.   
But the list itself is a nice introduction to animation theory and a good reference for later.

It's also important to understand that you do not need to use every principle in every animation that you do.
Each one is a combination of theories that will help you improve an animation that can be used together or isolation.

I need to break the exercise down into multiple posts.
Will add more later.

[Zizka]

Yay, you got around to it.  Great initiative.

[Azuyre]

Thanks for the info so far! It looks like those spoiler tags are getting put to good use already.

I've been trying to see what I can do with pencil/paper but I had a bit of trouble at first, mostly with getting things to line up correctly. It turns out my roommate has a light board (I think that's the name?) so I plan to try and use that and see if it helps out.

[Crow]

Thanks for the info so far! It looks like those spoiler tags are getting put to good use already.

Regarding that: is anybody else having display issues caused by AdBlock?

[PixelPiledriver]

I've been trying to see what I can do with pencil/paper but I had a bit of trouble at first, mostly with getting things to line up correctly. It turns out my roommate has a light board (I think that's the name?) so I plan to try and use that and see if it helps out.

In school we did everything with ColErase pencils on paper and a peg board light table. ----> There are much less expensive designs that also work fine.
Then we would shoot each page using a down facing camera onto a computer.
The camera would send the frame to a very simple animation program, called FlipBook I think, which we used to build the animation.
It had very simple features like sorting frame order, delays, layers, etc.
Altho it only supported Multiply layering so drawings would overlap onto each other.
You had to erase out the lines that would be occluded by another object on a layer above.
I'm not suggesting you do your exercises on paper.
In fact all the animations above I did in GraphicsGale.
Just something fun to try.

Almost done writing the next one.