3 Mistakes to Avoid in Animation

Animation mistakes are a very sensitive subject to talk about because most of the time they can be unconscious, maybe you’ve done them for a long time now, and you haven’t realized. The way to counter that is by getting professional feedback, that’s when people learning animation by themselves are disadvantaged against those going to a school. Here are 3 common mistakes.

Only Action with no Anticipation or Aftermath

Professional animators can easily tell when a project was animated by a veteran or an amateur, just by looking at some characters doing actions with no anticipation or aftermath.

Imagine a female ninja jumping from one roof to another. The best way to depict that movement is to work on the anticipation, she crouches, looking at the other roof, measuring (anticipation). Then she jumps (action). Finally, she lands on the other roof with the famous three-point-landing, looking at the floor and then looking back up, maybe she is right in front of her enemy.

The amateur would have the female ninja jumping and landing in front of the enemy, from one roof to the other, flexing the knees only a little when she lands. That is unnatural and is a very basic mistake you need to avoid if you want to look professional. Just insert what comes before and what comes after.

Cluttered Timeline

A timeline cluttered with millions of keyframes can make you feel like you have done a lot of work, and if you work for someone, your boss might be impressed, but most of the time, this can be a serious problem.

The problem with tons of keyframes is that it can harm the natural “feel” of a movement, it can make it look “weird” and “strange”, maybe “choppy”. This is because the excess of keyframes destroys the flow of motion, and the best way to solve this is by using interpolation curves.

If you see the complex and natural movement of the characters and the timeline is clean and with just a few keyframes, you should pay your respects because you are in front of an awesome animator, someone who understands movement and has fought many battles with cluttered timelines. A master of Interpolation Curves.

Interpolation curves are the way the movement happens between two keyframes. To give you a rough idea, there are 4 basic types of interpolation: Ease in, Ease out, Ease in/out and Hold. These are presets for the curves you can put between 2 keyframes, and the best software out there has a curve editor, so, take this in mind if you are deciding on getting an animation software.

Limiting the number of keyframes and playing around with their interpolation curves will help your characters to have a more natural movement.

Impulsive Animation, No References

This is by far the most common and tempting to fall to. Only animators who have been doing projects for years, using references, can let them behind to go on their own. But make no mistake, their intuition comes from using references in the past.

Every action and every movement need a reference, even a simple hand gesture.

It can be very tempting to just start moving your characters, inserting keyframes like crazy. Yes, you can do that for the fun of it, but when you get down to business you need references for everything. Remember anticipation, action and aftermath? Well, you get them to be in their most natural when you use references.

That’s why many animators have a mirror along with their computers, so they can mimic movement, and better yet, a webcam to record expressions and tiny little hand movements, so they can analyze how many frames for the anticipation, how many for the action and how many for the aftermath.

That’s how you get natural movement, that’s how the big hotshots do it.