From the course: Animating in 2D: Loosening Up

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Loosen head articulation

Loosen head articulation

From the course: Animating in 2D: Loosening Up

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Loosen head articulation

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- [Instructor] It's all too easy to fall into the trap of being timid when animating the head. Even in the days of hand-drawn animation, junior animators had a tendency to avoid articulating the head in spite of the fact that the head is an extremely flexible object. This is made worse with puppet-based animation, like Adobe Flash or Animate or Toon Boom Harmony. It's very common to see scenes with an up-down settle pattern. In effect, the head is like a little spring, whereas, in reality, the head's more like a ball socket. And we need to be able to move past this cliche or pattern, so let's see how. The most obvious thing to remember is that we can pivot from the base of the neck and the base of the skull. So I've marked these two pivot points with these red crosses. And here I'm overlaying the images to give you an idea of the distance and spacing I use for this animation, so about from here to there. And here's the travel for the opposite side. So how far you can push your…

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