Weight Shift Exercise

Video 1: Spidey Weight Shift Animation

In this weight shift exercise, I learnt many important concepts of animation. The important concepts that I learnt are:

Key extreme poses
Key extreme poses are key frames that are the most critical positions of the character. These key extreme poses best describes what the character is doing or experiencing. For example if we go back to the bouncing ball exercise, the key extreme poses will the highest points and lowest points of the ball.

In-betweens

In-betweens are key frames placed in between key extreme poses. It helps to enhance the animation by tweaking the animation to make it look more realistic. In-betweens can help incorporate 'ease in and ease out' into your animation, which will be discussed down below.

Straight ahead method
The straight ahead method is the easy but tedious method and not much planning for the animation (storyboarding) is needed to be done. The straight ahead method is to set a key frame one after another, hence resulting in a lot of key frames at the end. If a change is needed to be done in the animation, everything after the change will have to be re-done as well. Hence, this method is not as efficient as the pose to pose method which will be discussed down below.

Pose to pose method

The pose to pose method is by a more complicated but more efficient method. This method only requires the key extreme poses to be set in and then after that work on the timing and in-betweens of the animation. For this method to work, a lot of planning is needed to be done. For example, all the key extreme poses will have to be drawn out, for the animator to visualize. This method is more efficient because if any changes are need to be made, the animator only needs to tweak the key extreme poses or the graph editor, and the result of the animation will follow suit to the change.

Ease in and ease out

Ease in and ease out is to help the animation to look more realistic. Ease in and ease out describes inertia and gravity. It can be done by going to the graph editor and tweaking the tangents.

Anticipation

Anticipation usually occurs before the character does a movement. Anticipation can be a small action done by the character that leads to a larger and more exaggerated action. It allows the audience to follow the character and get a clearer picture of what the character is doing, rather than immediately jumping into the action without warning. Hence, anticipation helps to make the animation look more realistic and it is one of the key principles of animation.