Animation techniques

There are several things that can be used when animating to exagerate the action. Things such as easing in and out, squashing and stretching, and complete distortion. Lip synch is also important in animations so I'll talk about that too.

Easing in and easing out makes animations look more realistic. If a ball is rolled along the floor it doesn't start, move and stop at a constant speed. It will get faster and then slower as it rolls before coming to a stop.

A good squashing and stretching example would be a bouncing ball. When a ball is bounced, it does not stay the same shape. When it hits the a surface it squashes slightly as the force pushes it into the surface it has hit. However in animation it is sometimes good to exagerate and so the ball becomes stretched as it falls and bounces up, and exceedingly squashed as it hits the surface. This gives the illusion of a good bounce, and can be used in other objects or characters such as a character landing on the floor.


A good example of distortion to give the illusion of fast or vast movement would be Daffy Duck. If you paused a clip of Daffy going into a rage, the frame you saw would not look anything like a real duck or even a plausable character. When put together with many other vastly distorted frames the viewer is given the illusion of vast motion. The eye can not see each frame individually but the whole sequence and so, although it still does not look realistic, it is plausibly percieved as extreme motion.

Lip Synch is used so that when a character talks, the viewer can understand more what they hear and see that the character looks realistic in their actions. I have read that when talking to someone or watching the television a viewer will watch the mouth to help them compute what they hear faster. Subconscious lip reading. I've caught myself doing it a few times so this just drives home how noticeable bad lip synching would be.