Movies in my LYNDA/LINKEDIN-LEARNING ‘Tips & Tricks’ series covering arcs, assembled into a ‘virtual’ course. BTW, check out my patreon, there’s going to be a lot of animation resources posted there.
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1: BOUNCING BALL
Basic and boring, but let’s start with it anyway. The bouncing ball teaches us timing, spacing, squash and stretch, and more importantly for this subject, arc paths. Often when an animation just ‘feels’ off, it’s down to an arc error.
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2: PLOTTING ARCS
One thing I’m very strict on in my own work is arc-plotting. In the days of paper animation you would lay down a clean sheet and make dots for a body part across all keys/tweens, to check your arcs and spacing.
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3: FIGURE EIGHTS
We were always told to try to get nice ‘figure 8 loops’. Not to be taken too literally, but imagine a series of arcs looping back over themselves, for ever. See: the great owl from ‘Secret of NIMH’, and watch his beak.
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4: PLOTTING ARCS/TIMING
Another good example of arc plots, this time applied to a walk cycle. Arc/spacing errors on wrists or feet are a very common walk or run error – by plotting the joints you can quickly fine tune these.
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5: PLOTTING ACTING ARCS
Even standing and gesticulating, it’s worth it to a quick ark plot of wrists, and even the mass of the head, to make sure nothing odd is happening. This is especially important before you draw or do too much follow on work with secondary action on hair or clothing.
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6: CORRECTING MISTAKES
The examples in this movie show some VERY subtle mistakes, and how to detect and correct them. This kind of precision is vital if you want to reach for higher quality work (a lot of TV style animation does NOT require this level of focus).
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For more courses there’s a masterlist of classes, covering traditional principles as well as how to animate in Photoshop, Flash-AnimateCC, Harmony and After Effects. For new movies dealing with the free design/animation app KRITA, subscribe to my youtube channel and check out my patreon!
