Blog #3: Overlapping/Layered Action

Hey there! Welcome to Blog post #3 where I’ll be talking all about layered actions, sometimes also called overlapping action. Layered action is often used to move arms, or even flags in an elegant, flowing way. Even Spider-Man swinging on a line has some overlapping movement in it. This sort of movement looks like it starts at one end of the object and moves all the way to the other, overlapping or layering the animations of said object. So, here’s what I did for it.

For this exercise, I started off with something I thought was simple to get my head around the whole idea. Waving arms. Using Adobe Animate’s Bone feature, I made two arms that wave up and down. As you can see, they move from the upper arm first and then that movement flows all the way down the arm to the hand (see below.)

As you can see, the arms have a certain flow to them. The bone feature took some getting used to as it automatically makes a motion tween for the entire armature, but I think the final result, and after some in-between frame tweaking, i got to where I wanted to be. It’s rough and simple, but it gets the job done.

The next example was a little harder, but I ended up having to frame-by-frame it because Animate just was not working with me. The motion tweens were freaking out for some reason. Another way I could have down this was make key frames at important positions in the swing to make sure the major movements were captured, but when I was making it, I was a little peeved at the program from all the failed attempts that I just brute forced the whole thing. But it’s a guy swinging like Indiana Jones across a chasm.

I think it’s a fun little scene. It has some overlapping movement, and it’s a little rough at places but I’ve always been a more static artist, so having to move an arm twelve times is a new experience. But I’m learning some things through trial and error which is nice. The biggest thing I’ve picked up is that there’s always a way to get an animation down. Key framing, tweens, letting the computer handle it, (if it’s capable) but the biggest thing is you can always go back and tweak those middle ones to make the motion smoother. Anyway, looking forward to the next blog. See you there!