Dailymation
Animator Yoni Goodman writes:
"I decided to do a daily rough exercise in traditional animation, just to loosen the hand a bit and study the weights and motion.
Most of my career as an animator revolved around fast, efficient animations, mainly Flash cutouts.
Some time ago I got sick of the technicality of cutouts & decided to return to the basics of frame by frame drawn animation. To get my hand back in shape I started doing Dailymations - short, sketchy, rough & FUN animations, more about mass and movement and less about fine, clean animation.
Each exercises is done in about one - to - two hours of work (more or less).
Every now and then I'll post some of my other stuff, but this is mostly about Dailymations. "
Here is just one example . Check out the Dailymation blog and comb through the archives to watch what someone can do in an hour or two a day of animating just for the pure joy of it.
Walking Woman - animated by Yoni Goodman
"Done in about an hour-and-a-half." writes Yoni.
A simple rule about animation (as with many other things): the only way to get good at it is to DO IT. (A LOT!) Practice, practice, practice .
A couple of more:
Old Age - animated by Yoni Goodman
"Old woman getting to a chair
Thought i'd try something with a little more weight.
Thought i'd try something with a little more weight.
Took about an hour and a half."
Swordfight - animate by Yoni Goodman
"Didn't really plan how this fight would go, I let the characters lead the way. at some points I thought I'd let one guy win, then I countered the attack and let the other take the offensive, so in a way it was a bit like an actual swordfight (only m-u-c-h slower)
eventually no one won, I guess.
Done in about two hours"
Of course, these drawings could be refined more in a subsequent tie-down pass , but by working rough like this he gets his initial pass rough animated without investing a whole lot of time . Once you get something like this roughed-out you have something to work with , you can see it moving , and you can see where you need to tweak it. Then you're not just guessing about the timing. The sooner you can get your timing worked out rough in a "scribble pass" like this , then you can spend additional time refining the drawings and tweaking the timing as needed.