Animation 101: Anticipation and Follow Through Action

Oct 21, 2016

This week we focussed on the principles of Anticipation and Follow through Action. Anticipation Anticipation is used to prepare the audience for an action, and to make the action appear more realistic. A dancer jumping off the floor has to bend their knees first; a golfer making a swing has to swing the club back first. The technique can also be used for less physical actions, such as a character looking off-screen to anticipate someone's arrival, or attention focusing on an object that a character is about to pick up. Follow Through "Follow through" means that loosely tied parts of a body should continue moving after the character has stopped and the parts should keep moving beyond the point where the character stopped to be "pulled back" only subsequently towards the centre of mass and/or exhibiting various degrees of oscillation. Here are some videos that I found to better visually explain things: Anticipation:

Follow Through Action:

I set up my stop motion booth as I usually do and followed the bar sheet I had drawn out:

The best way to show you how I made this animation is to first show you the final result, and work backwards.

I quickly learned that using blue tack (positioned in a way that the camera could not see it), was the most effective way of giving the block more life. By adding these new dimensions of movement to the block, one can find that the illusion of life naturally starts to fall into place. This was present for me in the starting anticipation and then in the followthrough action (which both naturally ended up using aspects of slow in and slow out technique). I'm really starting to feel more comfortable with each principle as each new animation task is assigned to me. There is a clear learning curb that builds upon whatever I last learned about. All of these elements allow the animator more scope as an artist. (such as how I utilised staging in this brief, to 1) show depth of field and 2) allow the intended follow through action to not be cut short by focussing on the motion path remaining within the shot.) By having the block come into the foreground to land on it's 'B' position, the fluidity of my follow through action was not jeopardised by having to focus on keeping the block on the screen by following a linear A to B motion path. 1st try in Maya:

2nd try in Maya:

I found this harder to execute in Maya. My only solution is to start attending more of the Maya classes taught by James Russell.

UPDATE: Upon review it was suggested that my hold for my anticipation could be extended, this is relatively easy to fix in most editing software, here is the slightly-altered result: