How to Animate a Character

Video Transcript

"Creating animation is a matter of drawing keys and in-betweens. And if you're on a computer, it's posing those keys and in-betweens. Now, a...what I mean...when I say keys, I mean your key poses, whether it's someone turning their head and you would do a pose here and a pose here, or if it's somebody...you know, it's something more complicated or complex, like someone walking where you have key frames with legs and arms in various positions. Something could be as simple as a character standing up in a frame. We have the bottom of the edge of the frame here. We have a character starting low. We have a character starting low in the frame, and then standing up. I can flip those back and forth, and we can watch the character rise. Now, next, I would go and create those in-between drawings. If you were on a computer, the computer would figure out where those in-betweens go. If you want a character to move fast, you don't do as many in-betweens because if I move my head from here to here and there's only one frame between it, I'm going to zip my head very, very fast because film runs at 24 frames a second. If I put 12 drawings in between there, that's going to be half a second from here to here -- you know, about like that. If I want to start off slow, go fast, and end up slow again, I'm going to put drawings closer together at the beginning, at the end. So it starts out slow...slow, goes fast, and then kind of eases into the final pose. So you have your key frames, which are your major poses, your in-betweens, which are all the in-between poses...positions, obviously, and then you have easing in, easing out, or slow in and slow out poses so you can get those cushions in and out of movement."