From the course: 2D Animation: Tips and Tricks

Breaking a single joint

From the course: 2D Animation: Tips and Tricks

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Breaking a single joint

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- [Instructor] One of the strongest techniques that you can use when you want to loosen your animation is to break joints and this is a really good example of a very simple joint break, and it's happening right on the elbow. Let me pause the frame about here. That's our broken joint. So on the second frame, that's the first break of the joint and as you can see on the third image, it breaks again to restore itself back to the original natural orientation and so you get two breaks for the price of one basically every time, usually every time you do this you'll break and then settle back again. Well just to show you what this looks like if we overlay these frames and here I've also shown you a very common technique that I use when I'm plotting these out on paper and also sometimes if I'm working in Flash, Adobe Animator, Harmony, or some other program like that. It's always good to plot the arcs on a different layer above the original animation. And you can see again we have a beautiful arc path, and the ticks show frame numbers, so we have the key frames on one, nine, and 15, and the in between frames on three, five, seven, 11, and 13. And of course we have the final settle into frame number 23. So again, that's the final animation. There's another thing that you can do as well if you feel that these kind of things are catching the eye, maybe it's something that you want the viewer to feel, rather than see, then we can always increase the speed. And so here I've moved some of the breaking process onto a much faster timing. And this is the kind of thing you should play with to see if it works for you or not. And in this case you can barely see those broken joints. They're still there, all the animation frames are still there, but now it's smoothing so fast all you can really sense from this is looseness. That's a loose animation, and it helps to break away from the kind of stiff work that you will begin to do when if you're a beginning animator, or you want to move onto a higher level.

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