From the course: 21 Foundations of Animation

Straight ahead vs. pose to pose

From the course: 21 Foundations of Animation

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Straight ahead vs. pose to pose

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- [Instructor] There are two primary methods of animating. One is called straight ahead, and the other is called pose to pose. Let's take a look at the strengths and weaknesses of each. In straight ahead animation the clue is in the name. You do your first key frame, then your second, then your third, then your fourth, and so on, and when we inbetween the keys you can see we have a really nice acting scene. It's very strong. It's very loose, fluid. This has all the characteristics that you want from a straight ahead animation. There are a couple of reasons why we don't all animate straight ahead. One of the problems with straight ahead animation is that as you animate, without realizing it, you slowly gain volumes, and you can end a scene with a character very much larger than they were at the beginning. Clearly this is a very bad thing, and it makes planning very long, complex scenes difficult because you're going straight ahead throughout the entire scene, never quite sure where you're going to end up. Contrast this approach with pose to pose. In pose to pose, I'm starting out on frame one, and the second drawing I draw isn't the second key; it's the last one, so I know my start position and my end position. I then begin to block in all the various keys. That way I can tell, at every point in the process, where I'm coming from, where I'm going to, so when the scene is fully inbetweened we have a very nice little turn, so most animators, I think you'll find, tend to prefer pose to pose. If a scene needs complex planning with a background, I always go pose to pose because then I can plan every stage of the action relative to a background. When I was designing this alien walk cycle for my "Monsters and Aliens" course, I had to use pose to pose. It was really the only way I was comfortable with planning the whole thing out, so I wanted to calculate the length of the stride of this walk. This allowed me to plan it out. I was recently hired to do an animation video for Alan Parsons for his song "As Lights Fall," and one of the things that we wanted to get was a kind of a hand-drawn effect. Now, this kind of effect I did straight ahead. I just began drawing the first hand frame, and I went from there, and it was fantastic fun. Now, this kind of shot, I don't think I could have done pose to pose. There's just too much dramatic camera motion going on. There are times when straight ahead is the only way to do it, so that's it: straight ahead and pose to pose.

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