Primary and secondary animation principles

- [Instructor] It's important to understand the difference between primary animation and secondary animation. Or a primary action and a secondary action. It's really clear from this example. In this case, the ball is doing the primary animation and the little ribbon of hair, or for the top knot, that's the secondary animation. The motion of the ball determines more or less the position of the little cloth. In this case, it's an inanimate ball, so the primary actor doesn't have to be a living thing. The primary animator can be a thing. It could be a brick, it could be something that has no life in it at all. Let's see what this thing looks like when we actually move it. This is just very, very roughly put together, but as you can see, it shows how the ball moves and the little knot is determined by the position, the orientation, and the spin of the ball. Here's another example and this is from a previous course that I've done on animal walks and run cycles. As you can see, the horse is being the ball with the primary action, the entire body of the horse, but maybe with the exception of the ear, is the primary animation. In this case, the tail is really what's being determined by the primary action. The primary action is the body of the horse, secondary is the tail. As you can see, it's really a very simply little S curve back and forth, nothing fancy. This is also an animation from a previous course. In this case, the course was about how to animate monsters and strange creatures. Again, the primary action here in this skeleton zombie walk is the, more or less, the body itself. The whole thing is alive, if we can call it alive, but the one part that might be jumping out at you as a secondary animation is the jaw. There's a really fun, little secondary action on the jaw, which is just tracking along a few frames after the main action. Have a look at the beginning of the walk. It swings and then it follows, so it's just a hanging piece of bone. It has no real vitality to it. Unless he's, wants to start biting with it, in which case it would become a primary action again. Things are not primary or secondary all the time. An object in animation can go from one to the other, so always watch out for which part of the body is doing the main action and which part of the body is following along for the ride. Because this course deals with clothing and hair, here's a nice example of clothing. Very, very simple. He's nothing, anything super fancy here, but Dracula's cape. Also, this is from the previous course about monsters, is doing a very nice secondary action. Now, it's not doing anything super-flowy, it's just very heavy cloth and I wanted to snap it in to the hold, that very strong pose at the end, but this is a really, really good example of what we're going to deal with during the rest of this course.