This is a lesson from our Animate Animation course.
To get the full course, go to bloopanimation.com/animateanimation.
In this lesson, we'll be talking about the concept of animating in passes, what that
means and what the benefits for it are.
Animating in passes allows you to take simple steps several times, as opposed
to trying to animate everything in a complicated animation all at once.
Complex animation can be broken down into simpler, easier steps.
And then by going over that again, and again, you can make sure that your
animation is much more believable, much more readable and much more refined.
For example, let's take a look at our previous ball example before
going on to an actual example from the finished animation.
In the first pass, we do the basic motion.
In the second we add the anticipation overshoot, then the squash and stretch.
And then we refined the motion.
Essentially.
We went through and animated each of these steps, one at a time, rather than trying
to create this refined motion all at once.
First we did the position.
Then we did the overshoot.
Then we did the squash and stretch.
Then we did the refinement.
If I try to do this last step all at once, which I would just explore by opening up
this symbol, we have our first pass here.
Well, I just went from left to right.
Simply animating the position.
Very simple, very easy to do.
In the next pass, I added extra key frames for the anticipation and the overshoot.
In the next pass I added the squash and stretch using a few extra key
frames and animated the scale.
And the final pass I tweaked the speed of the animation, as
well as adding some additional wobble on the squash and stretch.
If I tried to do all of this in the first pass.
Not only would have been much more difficult to work in Adobe Animate that
way, it would also be much more difficult to get a believable and realistic motion.
By working in passes, we allow for a much more realistic motion taking a step
at a time and we don't get confused.
Whilst doing this on a simple ball seems quite redundant, you'll see that
in the next scene, using it for full animated scenes is almost mandatory.
Let's take a look at the finished animation first.
I've clipped the edges of the stage that we don't see the overshoot and I'll zoom
out slightly so we can see everything.
We have the ship, that pans in as if the camera is moving.
It builds up energy.
The camera shakes, the ship follows a path with frame by frame animated,
uh, fuel jets on the background there.
Lets watch it one more time.
The ship comes in out of the shadow, a planet that spins in the background.
The ship begins to build up energy.
The camera responds.
It swoops down towards the planet and disappears.
This finished animation was done and five passes and I've broken down each of
those passes over the following scenes.
The first pass, which I would expand to show all of the layers.
The first pass, as you can see is quite simple.
Even if you don't understand what these purple and yellow bars are at the moment.
In this pass, I did the panning of the ships and the planets, and I did a very
simple movement path where the ship scales down and rotates towards the planet.
Very simple, very easy.
And I blocked out the main animation.
There's no detail or nuance going on here.
Even on the looping background of the planets, where the moon, the
moons float around the planet.
Very simple animation, just rotating around and around the planet.
No nuance, just blocking out the main components.
On the second pass I came through and I added some camera animation, the
ship slides into view, but this time the camera continues to drift out
in order to keep the motion alive.
The ship builds up its energy, and I added some camera shake as well as
an extra bit of rotation to the ship, as it moves in towards the planet.
Here the biggest addition was the animation of the camera,
which keeps the animation alive when the ship stops moving.
The camera shake with several key frames and drifts towards the planet.
Again, very simple, adding a single thing.
Camera animation.
On the third pass, I added a shadow to the ship as it emerges from the right-hand
side, as well as the buildup of a glow on the ship's edge as it rockets away.
This glow was proceeding the rough pass of the frame by frame
animation I did for the jet fuel.
Comes out of the darkness, frame by frame roughs for the jet
fuel bursts, coming through.
The guiding path for the shape of the ship like so.
On the final pass, we came through and added the details to the fuel jets
on the spaceship as it launches off, including full frame by frame on ones
as the ship moves off toward the planet.
As you can see the combination of all this animation makes for quite a polished
finished scene, but taking it one step at a time allows us to manipulate and create
our animation with much more detail.
If I try to do all of this in one go it would have become much more unrealistic
and much more difficult to manage.
By the simple act of animating in passes.
We kept our job simple by doing simple steps several times.