ANTICIPATION
Anticipation is part of the Basic Principles of Animation. It’s often easy to forget it in our work as we can concentrate on making nice poses, timing, smooth motion, etc… but without it our animation can end up looking robotic.
Anticipation prepares the audience for a major action from the character. A simple example to demonstrate this is when a character is preparing to sprint forward, they may first move back slightly which conveys them building up momentum and preparing to sprint while also letting the audience anticipate their next action which is to sprint forward. Anticipation helps to set up believable actions as almost all real action has major or minor anticipation such as a diver about to leap off a diving board, or a boxer swinging a punch. Some examples of anticipation: • Entire body squashing down before jumping off a building • The heel of the foot pressing down before a step • Mouth compressing before opening to speak • An eye blink before a head turn As you can see from the list, the size of the anticipation does not matter. It can be broad or subtle. Create a series of pencil drawings that demonstrate the "ANTICIPATION" principle, hand this in as a photograph. Then use the same photograph and import it into ILLUSTRATOR or FLASH and clean it up. Then in FLASH set your drawings into motion. There should probably be a minimum of 8 drawings to create smooth motion. What are you handing in?
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