Blog #1: Timing/Spacing

Hello and welcome to the first of many blog posts! For this one, I will be talking about my adventures into 2D animation and the most important principle: Timing and Spacing (seems obvious from the title but who am I to judge?). So, where to start?

Let’s begin with the techniques, eh? Sound good? I can’t hear you but I’ll take your silence as you completely agreeing. At first I was simply looking to only use the computer to animate for this session, but when offered to take a chance I tried some stop motion as well. As for the computer program used, it was Adobe Animate. Not my first choice but, not a bad choice either. Using only the brush tool and individual frames with onioning, I made a short little film embedded below, hopefully.

After the little blob that splits into threes and converges again was made, I decided to make another layer and try a blob that looks like it is getting closer as well as farther away. This was a lot harder to achieve than I thought. But I managed with some editing of frames. Finally, I made a little bouncing blob just to practice an old classic. This was easy and yet difficult in 2D to get the blob to look like it was actually bouncing and not just a blob moving up and down. I think I achieved this by using better spacing, having it increase and decrease in speed, changing the distance between frames, and then squishing it when it hits the ground and stretching it just before and just after it hits the ground, which now that I remember, there is an invisible ground, so deal with it.

Next was the stop motion. I think between the two, this one is my favorite, probably due to the silliness of it, but also the simplicity. It is a scared frog driving a car and hitting a tree. Fairly easy to understand, but I think the best part is, for me at least, that this was not hard to achieve. It took some trial and error to begin with but using the same principles as before, I was able to produce a 3 second short I was happy with. The blobs are okay, but takes several watches to understand all the motions and is very hard to watch. This is simple, and has one focal point. Easy. Simple. Perfect.

In conclusion, I think these two little pieces worked for what was asked. If I had to do it over, I probably would try to remember to not have so much action at once, staging and eye movement are important but I’m sure we’ll get to it down the line. Anyway, see you in the next one. Ta-ta!