Animation exercise — Lift, push, pull


Overview

In this lesson, we first learned the basic steps of drawing an animation:

1. Have a plan

Don’t go straight into animation at first, this often leads to a lot of unnecessary mistakes and duplication of unnecessary work. You can visualize the action in your head first, a clear plan is necessary.

2. Look for references

It is best to shoot a video of yourself drawing the movements needed to perform, to personally feel how the movements start and end, and the different forces used in each stage.

3. draw some thumbnails

Draw some important and key actions on paper that you need to animate. In this phase you don’t have to worry too much about whether each stroke is correct, just draw.

4. keyframes

Draw the animation’s keyframes with reference to the thumbnails you drew.

5. Timing: Once you have your keys, do the first guesstimated timing and see how it looks. Then move on to the breakdowns. Retime and look closely at how the movement works. 


Push

I drew the push action first.

Thumbnails of Push movement
Video of Push movement


Pull

And then I drew pull movement.

Thumbnails of Pull movement

After I showed my sketch to the teacher, It seemed like although there was no big problem with my whole movement, it was not “animated” enough, which meant that I needed to exaggerate my movement more, and the range of movement became larger so that the movement would have more tension.

Demonstration from Vanessa

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