To help you spot articulation, we’ve come up with a few examples of articulation in animation on a scale ranging from highest to lowest. There are a tons of other factors that go into professional animation, but key frame frequency and articulation are at the top of the list. More key frames per second means better articulation for every action and smoother animation. This image actually employs low key frame density and smears for a super blurry frantic feel. Each time Shaggy and “Scoob” do something different-like come to a stop-the animation changes. Not every part of each character moves on every frame, in fact the animation is so jagged that it’s easy to see that their heads and bodies stay perfectly still while their arms and legs do the (very repetitious) moving. The fewer key frames, the more choppy and cookie cutter it looks. Quality animation is all about detail and movement.”īasically, the more key frames per second, the better (and smoother) the animation looks. How many drawings for a particular amount of time on screen. “Articulation is how much detail there is in the movement. IdeaRocket Creative Director and Founder Will Gadea puts it succinctly: These frames are literally frames that are key to the action being drawn - and let other animators (or computer software) fill in the surrounding frames with…less than perfect animation or the bare minimum movement to get the point across. No, instead of spending time and energy drawing 24 perfect frames that will just fly by, animators create “key frames” (often called “key poses”) to show action happening on screen. Your eye just doesn’t register images that quickly. If every second of animation is made up of 24 frames per second, all of those frames can’t be “important” moments. The other way to accomplish smooth transitions and actions is what animators call “key frames.” Articulation: More Key Frames = Smoother Animation It’s a time saver and in the hands of a master like Chuck Jones it lead to the development of the Warner Bros. The result is a blur of action that viewers’ eyes interpret as movement. This technique basically uses one single “smeared” frame of animation to fudge over all the individual frames of a fast action that an animator would normally have to draw. The first animation technique is called a “ smear,” and it’s one of the original animation hacks from legendary animator Chuck Jones (Warner Bros.). No, instead, animators rely on several animation techniques. It just takes too long to mimic life-like action in most cases. Budget and time constraints don’t allow an animator to use thousands of frames to make Bugs Bunny cross the street. And while it’s usually ideal for an animator to make every action as smooth as possible, sometimes that’s just not feasible. How quickly an animator makes objects on screen move through these hundreds of frames every few seconds determines the look and feel of the animation.īasically, the more frames it takes for something to happen, the smoother the animation looks. That means every single second of movie is made of 24 complete images that progress fast enough to look like fluid movement. In a film camera these frames go by at a rate of 24 frames per second (fps), and online most animations are timed to change at the same rate. Like live action films, every second of an animated video is really a collection of dozens of individual frames. To understand the importance of articulation choices and how they relate to key frames and the overall look and feel of your animation, you have to understand a couple of basic animation concepts. Before you make your next animated video explainer video or full-length feature film, learn how to spot a professional animation from the rest. We’re just going to slow things down a bit and examine how an animation gets from one frame to the next, and how those in-between frames say everything about the tone and the story. However, this post will take a closer look at one of the most basic yet overlooked aspects of animation - articulation and key frames and how they affect the timing and smoothness of the animation. The most convincing animated videos use techniques ranging from “squash and stretch” and “arcs” all the way to character appeal. When animators care about every single frame and master Disney’s classic 12 Principles of Animation, the results are smooth, realistic animation that people live. While it might look like magic, the best professional animation is really just meticulous attention to detail.
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