Week 1: Traditional Animation

The term began by visiting the roots of animation; 2D hand-drawn on a light-box. In my opinion, this was the best one to start with – there aren’t really any shortcuts or places to hide, it’s just you and a pile of frames to piece together.

Here we began to learn about the 12 principles of animation – the fundamental basics that are absolutely necessary to understand before moving on to anything more complicated. The ones that we focused on were ‘squash and stretch,’ ‘straight ahead and pose-to-pose,’ ‘arcs of motion’ and ‘timing and spacing.’

We applied these to every animators initial endeavor: the ball bounce, before starting to turn the ball into characters, and soon enough we were working on a short sequence of characters speaking and moving their hands.