12 priciples of animation and flip books

On mondays studio session we looked the 12 principles of animation and flip books. The 12 principles was a completely new concept to me and there was a lot to take in but a lot of the concepts within the subject were familiar. I feel to best way to learn about the 12 principles is by starting to look out for them more in animations I watch in future, as when we were showed an ice age clip containing an example of all 12 principles I found it very helpful in clearing up my understanding. Hopefully after a while most of the 12 principles will become second nature after studying them further so they require less thought when animating in the future.

After looking at the 12 principles the class were all given flip books to try animate the classic bouncing ball animation. This task mainly focused on 2 of the 12 principles Squash/stretch and timing. Squash and stretch were used to give the balls fall and bounce more fluidity. Timing was important to make the fall and rebound look realistic, if the ball took twice as long to fall than to rebound back up it would look very wrong. Before this I had made a few flip books but they were very simple and they were not very effective. It was good fun doing the flip books and I felt like I learnt a lot. In my opinion learning is easiest when its hands on rather than from a text book. The main problem I ran into whilst making one of my flip books was my animation sometimes looked ridged, this was caused by using straight lines instead of using arcs (one of the 12 principles). It was good making that mistake as that will stick in my mind in future if I encounter a similar problem.