Week One: Flipbooking And The Twelve Principles Of Animation (OUAN403)

We started our course by learning the twelve principles of animation, which we applied to flip books. I found that I kept going back to my notebook as I made the flip book to check up on how I should be applying each of the principles of animation to give the object energy and weight. I enjoyed animating simple stuff in the flip books like bouncing balls, but overall I found the fact that I couldn't see through more than one piece of paper at a time frustrating as it meant that key frames were hard to draw. Also, I got mad at the fact that my thumb kept getting stuck on one page which resulted in flipping half the book at once. I don't think that anyone in history has successfully flipped a flip book the whole way through.

I was pleased with my bouncing ball flip book, particularly the blue one. The sense of gravity in the red one is a little askew and the ball stays in the air for longer than it needs to.

This flipbook with the running man looks like absolute garbage. Firstly, his body doesn't move up and down when he is in mid stride. Only his legs do. Secondly, he stays in the air for far too long. Thirdly, the second part of the flipbook happens so quickly that no one can understand what's meant to be happening. This looked absolutely awful and I hate everything about it

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I really enjoyed moving on to pencil test animations. It was incredibly satisfying to watch the line tests when I could properly see the twelve principles in practice.

                                         

I had to make quite a few tweaks and redraw quite a few frames, either because the squashing and stretching looked off or the object was moving too quickly or slowly.

A problem I encountered quite a bit was that the objects or characters would grow or shrink as I drifted off and lost track of what their dimensions were supposed to be, but I suppose that will improve with practice. Learning about timing has been really helpful and I tried to visualise exactly how many in-between frames would go between each key when doing the pencil tests. Again, I'm sure the knack for visualising it in my head will develop with practice.

Also, this jumping man's legs float to the ground way too slowly