2D Animation: Tips and Tricks

- [Instructor] With a very complicated action, something with a secondary action, there's a lot of business going on. We have various parts of the costume flapping around, and creating arc paths. And these arc paths also have to be plotted. I've covered this in other movies, and it's well worth covering again, because there are different solutions to different examples, and the more of these you see, I think the better feeling you're going to have, for the kind of problems that might crop up, and potential solutions. 'Cause there's more than one kind of problem and more than one solution, so let me show you a couple. So on the left side here, you'll see our character, who has the arc plot. And he has a green plot for this side of the costume. See this little dot here. That point there is being plotted throughout this very pretty arc path. And this corner here is the blue path. Now I'm not going to focus on the blue path for this, so let's just hide that. And I'm going to play, I'm playing in Adobe Photoshop using, it has a rudimentary but very usable animation feature, a little timeline window. So I'm going to play all my layers as animation frames. Let's play it through again. One thing that Photoshop defect, is it doesn't quite play at the right frame rate. You have to render a video to see the right frame rate, but it will play you the frames in sequence. And it gives you a good enough feeling for it. Now, one thing that began to bug me about this, was the coattail around the mid-point here. Now if you follow the corner that's going to track this green line. Now, I'm going to go through frame by frame. As I went through frame by frame, it begins jut out. It's sticking out like a sore thumb. So it is a nice arc path all right, but it's got too much energy. It caught the eye. It looks plastic almost. It looks like it's too hard. Wasn't feeling like clothing anymore. So I thought the solution would be to do something like this. So I'm going to zoom in here, so you can get a better idea, just to trim the amount of energy on the coat, to pull it in, and still follow a nice arc path. So it meant redrawing the coat, on one, two, three, four, five drawings. So again, which is the importance of plotting the arcs, to minimize this kind of redrawing. So let me play this through. That's much better. So by doing that, we've taken a lot of the energy and the volume gain away from the coat. And so now as we go through, he's tracking the red path. And we're not seeing that nasty little pop anymore. So that's one example. Let me show you a different example of a fix. This fix is on the tail end of the action, which is this part with the coat here. So on the, let's play it on the left side first. Now you should be seeing a really ugly pop right there. So what was happening here, was again, we have a nice arc plot here, but something that slipped out. So frame 37 was good. This is fine. This is fine. And I made a mistake on number 43, so my arc plot was, something went wrong here. So either I swapped the drawing out, or my drawing slipped of place. So the result is this little jag. So whatever the why's and where for's of how this happened, this is the kind of thing that happens. So let's see what's the least painful way of fixing it. So we'll go to the right side. So what I, this box, before I do that, let's just shuttle through there first. So the problem frame is there. So even though this is a key frame, I decided to rub this out, and to redraw, so that I would in between, between the drawings on either side.. So here is the trouble frame here. So I rubbed it out and do a clean drawing between here and here. And I cross my fingers. So the right side you'll see the result. And the result is very nice. So I've added the scarf and some other bits so you can see, but it's a pretty smooth motion. It took that one bad drawing out, turned it into an in between temporarily, and it softened the motion. So as I pull out, there we go. So again, another good reason why, if something is jagging, if you see it, then obviously, examine your arc plot, but sometimes you have to plot the arc to see the mistakes. Sometimes you see the mistake, and then you make the arc plot. So there's a bit of back and forth between seeing what the problem is and fixing it. But this is how we do it. It's like this is the end result when you've got everything down and you think it's good, you go through it very slowly or play it at half speed, and let it loop, and then look at it. And just keep looking at different parts. Look at the scarf. Look at the coat. Look at the hair. And then play through three, four, five, six, seven times. And what you will sometimes find is something will start to annoy you. That's when your brain is tellin' you somethin's not right, something's not right. And that's when you go in and look at these trouble spots. And then either fix the key frame, or add an in between, or soften the motion. And so here's the scene with just a coat in blue, and there we go. So we've taken the kinetic energy out of the turn there, and then we have added the nice softening at the end.