However the way you have come to learn animations, you cannot ignore the importance of the principles. Frank & Olie would say they are twelve, Richie goes a little more and others plus or minus. I guess the aim is what works best for you in animating. I‘ll be looking at some of them for now and maybe others later.

Timing and Spacing: Perhaps the most popular amongst animators, this refers to the hits that appear in an audio, expression or whatever it is the animator is working on. or in my own way, timing is the prompt response or action put in place to match an occurence thereby giving it life and making it believable. Spacing on the other hand is how near or farther apart this actions are placed. They both work hand in hand and a typical example would be; A bomb explosion happening with someone orbiting a radius of about 500km away and starttling at about the time of the explosion. Explosion is sound based and happening fast and so is the reaction of that someone, hence the startle & also happening fast. You cant be on the road waiting for a bus unaware of the shock that a bursted tyre of a vehicle close to you gives and react to it a minute later, especially if it is loud as it will appear unnatural. The spacing is all the junk that happens inbetween your expression or reaction. The spacing is within the timing.

Overlapping Action: This suggests that everything does not happen at once. Things happen in stages and at different times. Picture you picking up ur phone to take a call. The phone has to signal you first, then you either look at its location or just go straight to it if you know where it is. with phone in hand its taken to your eyes for inspection before the ears and then the magic word “hello“. These are the basic steps for this action, stil a lot goes into it while animating, so its really not that easy. But all these steps mentioned above must be in place to make it believable.

you are right sir

denpen:
you are right sir

Thanks Boss.

Squash & Stretch: It can be simply seen as compress & expand. This principle of animation is what gives flexibility. And there is a lot of that happening on a bouncy ball, in a running animal, in the face and most other activities that we do. For me, i think it occurs if there is a certain force acting towards that object or at least performing some sort of motion and secondly, object must be organic in nature. Without this tag team principle, those funny flat heads and stretched out bodies that make tom and jerry funny amongst other things, wont happen. Squash and stretch not only gives flexibility, it also gives life when applied correctly.

Ease in and Out: This is perhaps the easisest principle to understand and can be explained thus. Consider a car on a test drive from its stationery state. Even if the purpose of the drive is to cover 200m/s speed at a particular time x, it must first begin with lower speeds less than one. Now when it gets to its peak and intend to diccelerate, it will do that gradually from 200 to 100 to 50 then strolls down to lesser digits until it gets to zero. Now here is the thing, at the beginning and ends are slower, that is at acceleration and decceleration. Hence the ease in and outs. It would look unreal or too mechanical getting to top speed in a second or two. And though something like this may sometimes happen in animations like Sony‘s “Hotel Transilvania“ but this is to create effect and not to be mistaken for ease in and outs.