Reviewing Animation Basics

the lean forward and the rise. That takes time, too. Explore and

understand real-life timings. Once you get a feel for them, start to

modify and play with them.

Animé, Japanese animation, makes great symbolic use of modi￾fied timings to convey different feelings. Characters hang in the air

much longer than they “should” before crashing back down to the

ground with an impact that belies their apparent mass. This obvious

departure from reality crafts feelings of great power and other￾worldliness. Animé uses timing to sculpt how you, the viewer, feel

about what you’re seeing. Something just barely perceptibly outside

of reality makes a viewer feel uncomfortable. Slowed timing appears

dreamlike. Often, when timing is artfully used to sculpt feelings, the

audience only gets the impact of the feelings, and is unaware of the

reasons why.

Timing is also a rhythmic device. Just like music, animation has

beats, rhythms, and tempos. You want to keep things interesting for

the viewer and not have everything fall on the same timings. This

makes a scene read dull and flat. If your scene has keyframes every

eight frames, it will read like mush. You have to break up the keys,

stagger them, and syncopate them. Get the audience to expect

something by setting up a pattern, and then break that pattern

(ONE, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, TWO, three,

four...). Keep them on their toes, when their toes need to be kept

on. Slow, languid scenes need this special attention to timing even

more than frenetic scenes to keep the audience from losing interest,

yet maintaining their dreamy flow.

Timing is also important to get across the relationships between

objects and mass. Massive objects don’t get moving as quickly as

slight ones do, but when they do, they’re quite a challenge to stop.

A light object or character can leap up from the ground more quickly

than a heavy one. Lighter items can seem to float a bit more before

gravity begins to exert its effect. Heavier items can seem to be

pulled greedily back down to Earth.

Everything you do with timing helps the audience to differenti￾ate between the shapes they see on screen.

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Chapter 10: Reviewing Animation Basics

10.2 Squash and Stretch

Squash and stretch is one of the keystones of good animation. Even

the most realistic of animations needs to have some element of

squash and stretch in it. Animation is all about the emotional impact

of experience; you alter the outline of a thing (not the volume) to

give the audience a visual interpretation of the forces impacting it.

1. Load Objects\Props\Ball.lwo into Layout.

2. Make a 21-frame sequence (from 0-20) where the ball bounces

similar to Figure 10.1.

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Note:

Animation is experience. If you don’t live it in your heart, it

won’t come out of your scene.

Note:

Since stopwatches are such physical objects, and you may leave

for work and forget it, I’ve included a small animation timer on

the CD under Extras\AnimationTimer\. There are two files that

are, in essence, the same thing. One is just the bare .swf

(Flash4 file), and the other is an .exe (executable program)

exported as a stand-alone from Flash to run on Windows

machines. If you’re on a Mac, open up your Internet browser

(with the Flash4 plug-in installed from http://flash.com ) and

drag the .swf file into the open Internet browser window. You

can also choose File|Open and browse to the .swf file. You can

e-mail this tiny .swf (only 68K) to yourself so you’ll never be

without a way to time animations! It does frames, feet/frames,

SMPTE, and seconds. It converts between these formats, and

you can use it to do some rudimentary frame-offset calcula￾tions. (Click on the “Help?” icon to find out more!)

In order for the ball to really give the impression that the force

of gravity is pulling it down to the ground where it impacts and

springs back up again, we have to push reality a bit.

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Figure 10.1. This bouncing ball has good timing to it: It accelerates

toward the ground, springs back up, then decelerates as it nears

the top of its rebound. The timing may be good, but it has no

squash and stretch to it. (You can find the scene to study in

Scenes\chapters\ch10\Figure_10-01.lws.)

Figure 10.2. Just using stretch and rotate to put rudimentary

squash and stretch on the ball gives a visual read to the forces

acting upon it. (See Scenes\chapters\ch10\Figure_10-02.lws.)

3. Now, using whatever techniques you’d like, add some squash

and stretch to your bouncing ball scene.

Compare what you’ve got with Scenes\chapters\ch10\Figure_

10-02.lws if you need to. Always remember to preserve the volume of

the object. When you squash in Y, the object has to expand in X and Z

in order to preserve the mass we perceive it to have. We’re not get￾ting rid of mass, we’re displacing it. (Think of a water balloon. When

you squeeze or stretch it, there’s still the same amount of water in

it — until it pops, that is.)

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Note:

A more believable take on this would be to use bones to flatten

the ball around the area of impact where it hits the ground. I also

like to stretch objects into wedge-like shapes with the point of the

wedge leading the eye into the coming motion.

Note:

LightWave, having introduced Bezier interpolation for splines, has

made it a whole lot easier to get nice, smooth motion curves.

Don’t be afraid to drop the old TCB splines in favor of these more

controllable curves. However, because you have more ability to

noodle with the Bezier handles, you can more easily throw things

out of whack. I’ve also noticed that Bezier splines almost always

need some kind of adjustment and are rarely interpolated cor￾rectly (for my tastes) by default.

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Note:

Something to be said about working with spline curves is that they should have

the absolute minimum number of keyframes needed to keep the item moving,

and they should be as elegant as possible. “Elegant” is a relative term and does

not necessarily mean “smooth.” The curves should be a linear interpretation of

the action. I like to think that the curves should be pretty if the motion is to be

flowing and beautiful, or harsh if the motion is to be percussive and violent.

Figure 10.3. Here are the scale curves for my bouncing ball.