The Bouncing Ball

The famous bouncing ball that every animator have to animate. This is one of the first few animations we were asked to do. Mainly because it comprises of the basics of every animation. Though simple, to animate a bouncing ball to its perfection takes skills. But it's just a ball you say?

That's right, it may just be a ball but the principles used to animate this bouncing ball is going to be in EVERY of your future animation. Simply put it, before you start to draw objects/organic things, you start off with drawing strokes. Before you start running you have to learn to crawl and walk. This 'bouncing ball' exercise is the baby version of crawling.

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Key Poses & In-betweens

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Well, the main reason why I'm showing you the bouncing ball exercise is because I would like to share with you one of the most important part of animation that occurs before you start any animation. It is applied in the observation phase and the planning phase. It is also known as Key Poses & In-betweens.

Definition:

Key Poses : These are the KEY moments that your character MUST show in the scene. Without these Key Poses, the actions or story may not be as strong or even lost in translation. Key Poses are the MOST IMPORTANT action in your scene. If done right, it will properly show audience the character's emotions and actions of the scene.

In-betweens : In-betweens are what fills in the empty time between Key Poses. For a Character to get from Key Pose A to Key Pose B, there are In-betweens, not as important as Key Poses, but still affects the timing and spacing of the action.

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Key Poses

In the image above, you can see the three Key Poses of the bouncing ball. The first one would be when the ball is on the ground. The second one with the ball at it's highest peak, and the third when the ball lands and touches the ground once again. No matter what happens in-between these Key Poses will not affect how the ball starts and ends and at its highest peak.

Definitely, when we animate, we are not always going to be animating the bouncing ball. But the essential of the bouncing ball must be drilled into the animator's head before they can proceed if something more complex like this.

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With the same principle of the Key Poses used in the bouncing ball basics, you apply it to more complex animations like this little stickman jumping forward.

The animators would plan all these BEFORE the actual animation begins because it is important that the key poses are done right.

There are Key Poses for anything animation, even subtle dialogues.

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Drawing or Thumbnailing the Key Poses as you can see above is important for two reasons. First, is that you can see how exaggerated the action of the character going to be. Secondly, you can plan the character's emotions and feelings through the facial & poses. Is he angry? Is he sad? Happy? All these are required to be done in the Key Pose.

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In-Betweens/Breakdowns

What happens in between the two Key Poses is right here. This is where the animators plan the timing & spacing before and after it reaches a Key Pose.

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As you can see above the importance of the Inbetweens/breakdowns as well when it comes into play. The Giphy above shoes the timing and spacing of the poses. If the keyframes are all spread out equally, the ball will travel from pose A to pose B at the same speed. But when you start to play around with the distances of the inbetweens, u can get variations of how fast and how slow the object move.

Taking these apart. What you're seeing is when the keyframes are compiled together into an animation. If you break it down, it is something like this.

As you can see in the image above, the In-betweens and the breakdowns. In-betweens are basically just frames connects all the important frames like the Key Poses and Breakdowns. Most of the time when the Key poses are done well and breakdowns are properly adjusted, you don't really need to adjust much of the inbetween except to just smooth your animation graph.

That being said, you would need to have a few keyframes of Key Poses and Breakdowns before you can almost ignore the inbetween animations. You can't except to just have minimal keyframes and expect the inbetweens to cover for you.

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I hope I didn't get TOO technical for some of you who are reading this. But I hope that this will help animation newbies to grasp the importance of planning your Key poses and Inbetweens. It definitely takes a lot of practices to finally get the hang of it, but it will be worthwhile.

I pwooomise...

All GIFs were taken from www.giphy.com

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Thank You

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Posted from my blog with SteemPress : http://zord189.vornix.blog/2018/07/05/animation-key-poses-in-betweens/

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