Lauren's Communication Blog: Blog 3: 12 Principles of Animation

The 12 principles of animation are as follows:

1. Squash and stretch: this gives a sense of weight and flexibility to characters and animations. This can either be used comically

or in realistic animation

to show fluidity and movement. In realistic animation, the volume of the object does not change.

2. Anticipation: This principle is used by alerting the audience subtly that an action is about to take place.

Here, the elephant lifts his foot first, informing the audience that he is going to put his foot in the water. This keeps the audience from feeling the animation is disjointed or jerky.

3. Staging: Staging is the animator's way of setting a scene so that the audience is aware where and who the most important things are. This avoids unnecessary details.

Here, the background is muted and stationary while the characters are colorful and moving.

4. Straight Ahead Action and Pose to Pose: SA action is drawing every frame while PtP is drawing only the key frames of an animation. SA action looks more fluid while PtP is good for emotional scenes.

5. Follow Through and Overlapping Action: These give the impression that animations follow the laws of physics, making them more realistic. Follow through means body parts keep moving when the action has stopped. Overlapping action means not everything is symmetrical.

6. Slow in and slow out: Animation is generally more realistic if there are more frames and time spent on motions at the beginning and end of an action.

7. Arcs: To make realistic animation, things tend to follow arcs. Arcs tend to create the bridge between one extreme and the next.

8. Secondary action: This is secondary actions given to a character to add realism. i.e. whistling or swinging arms while walking.

9. Timing: the number of frames/drawings per second that give the film speed. Correct timing gives animated objects the ability to look realistic.

10. Exaggeration: depending on whether the artist is trying for realism or not, exaggeration can create caricatures or simply express an emotion that otherwise anatomically correct characters could not do well.