12 Principles of Animation in After Effects

In this lesson, we're going to learn about the animation principle of anticipation. So here's where we left off, and we're just going to take a very simple look at anticipation. Depending on the complexity of your movement and the amount of objects you have in your scene, anticipation could be very easy to apply, or it could be more difficult. In this case, I want us to take a simpler view of this so we can see what anticipation is. Now, as we said previously, there is a main action or a primary action, which is what our object is doing. So in this case, we're rotating something. And then we have ease in and ease out to leave our primary action. But before most primary actions, we need a little bit of anticipation. Anticipation is what happens before the action. Now a most commonly quoted example of this is, a batter does not simply raise his bar and then swing forward. He eases back in anticipation for hitting the ball, and then he twists his hips, and then rotates in anticipation of hitting the ball. An anticipation helps the audience read what's coming up next. So Walt Disney also called this aiming. In that, we want the audience to know exactly what the next motion is going to be so there's no confusion. So in this case, we're rotating to the left. So let's add a little bit of anticipation of this by easing back, or by rearing back, our animation before we dive forward or before we rotate forward. So to do this, it's going to be a very simple process. Let's copy the first key frame, and let's jump back maybe four or five frames. Drop it down, and in the middle here, let's pull our animation back a little bit. So we're rearing up before we get into our primary action. So let's just RAM preview this, and let's just take a look. So now, you can see we have a little bit of anticipation where we go back and then begin going forward. Now, the timing of this is a little bit too strong. I don't really like having anticipation be that quick. So let's actually slow it down a little bit. Let's maybe lessen the effect. So instead of going all the way to 49, let's maybe go to something like 45. We just want a very slight motion to help the audience understand what's coming up next. So let's take a look at this. So we rear back and then begin moving forward into our primary action, and then we ease out into another still pose. Now in this case, anticipation was very easy to add, but as you can see here, it adds quite a lot into our animation. We are letting our audience read into what we're going to be doing next by almost having, not the opposite happen, by having what the object would do in anticipation for this. So, another common thing is, if we move the camera forward, we're going to move the camera back a little bit in anticipation to fly forward. If we're going to scale something up drastically or scale it down, we're going to do the opposite, or we're going to have that object anticipate the movement that is coming up. Now, of course, these objects are not real and wouldn't really be anticipating this, but adding in these tiny little cues to let the audience know what is going to happen next creates much more appealing motion. And really, the more your objects are in motion, the more appealing they're going to be. All right. So let's apply this exact same principle to this last piece here. So again I'm going to copy, paste this, and dial back just a little bit. This time let's do a little bit more of an anticipation, because maybe we're going to be moving forward faster. And to do that, we can pull these key frames forward a little bit. And for a faster movement, you're going to need more anticipation for the audience to be able to read that motion. So let's take a look at this. So we go from OK to Good, and then the Good rears back and flies over to Best. Still not fast enough. Let's pull this back a little bit further. When you have a big anticipation, you're going to need a big primary action to justify having that much motion. And the amount of anticipation you need is defined by the speed of the primary action. If something is happening incredibly fast, you can help the audience read what it is if you give it more anticipation or a longer anticipation period. But if it's a very slow movement, you're probably not going to need too much anticipation getting into it. So in this case, we have quite a few frames of anticipation. Let's pull this even further, and then it just flies forward. [INAUDIBLE] change this next key frame to linear so it goes back and then, schwoo, flies forward into the Best. So OK to Good, and then we have a real big anticipation before a fast movement. OK, great. So you can see by applying just a few simple principles, we take an action that began as very boring-- let's take a look at the original motion. Takes a second to RAM preview. That means it probably isn't that great. We can see here, very boring, doesn't catch our attention, doesn't look appealing. But by applying all these various animation principles, we were able to convey the same message, but in a much more entertaining and a much more interesting fashion. No difference assets, just different movement. So, just to sum this lesson up, whenever you have a primary action, it's good to add some anticipation before the action to let the audience know what is coming up.