The Three Fundamentals of Animation

The three fundamentals of animation will seem obvious – but that’s where everything begins, with the obvious. Once you understand and can use the fundamentals, you’ll be able to turn the movement that you feel your characters making into the positions your character gets into for each frame in your animation.

Path

And imagine some of the ways that a character can travel between them.

Spacing

Move a larger distance in each frame and the motion is faster.

To accelerate or decelerate an object, the spacings have to vary along the path of the motion.

Your turn: Path and Spacing Do this simple exercise in Animation Path and Spacing. All the directions and the files you need are on the Path and Spacing exercise page. You can also download the frames I shot and check them out!

Animation Timing

Timing is how quickly or slowly things move, or otherwise happen. We all have a feel for how fast a ball bounces, or how long it takes to take a step when we’re walking. The world is full of things that happen repeatedly, regularly, rhythmically; music and dance are both all about the rhythms of repeated movements.

Timing (or rhythm) and spacing are tied up together with the frame rate of your animation. A high frame rate makes motion look faster, and a low frame rate slows it down. I could write all day about it and give formulas, but that wouldn’t give you a feeling for how it works. There’s absolutely no substitute for actually doing animation to get a feel for timing, spacing and frame rate.

Here's an example - three bounces that all use the same 23 frames, at three different frame rates:

23 frame bounce at 12, 16, and 25 frames per second

Which is the “right” speed? That is something that you, the animator, decide. I go into frame rates a little on the How Animation Works page. The motion you feel is right for the character will need more frames at higher frame rates, and fewer frames at lower rates.

There’s a parallel with music concepts here, too. A piece of music can be played at slower or faster tempos just as an animation can be viewed at lower or higher frame rates. Each tempo or frame rate has a different feeling. If you imagine a drum beating as the circles bounce, you’ll easily feel the tempo differences.

The bounce is one of the classic animation exercises - it requires spacings that give your object acceleration and deceleration and (most often) a curved path.

Your turn: animate The Bounce Animate The Bounce for yourself. Then check out how I animated two bounces on the same motion chart by downloading the frames I shot!

Don't limit yourself to just one bounce. Try animating a bounce without a chart for your path and spacing. Play it and see what kind of personality you've put in your character. Then put personality into it. Above all - keep animating!