From the course: Motion Graphic Design: Animation

Straight to pose animation

- [Instructor] There are two main types of animation in traditional animation. One is called straight ahead animation and the other is called post pose. If you want to follow along, we're in 0301 straight pose. If you have access to the exercise files, you can open that to follow along. Straight ahead animation would be a situation where you would start at frame one, draw your character, and then move to frame two, draw the next one, and continue throughout, just drawing it frame by frame. It's quite an experimental approach which is nice, but it takes a long time. The other process is called post pose animation and it was developed by some of the big animation companies as a more economical way in terms of time to create animations. In traditional animation, the head animator would do the key drawings, which are the key frames. He'd then hand them to an assistant animator who would fill in all the steps in between. That's where the name tweening comes from. If you were an assistant animator, you'd also be known as a tweener. So, in After Effects, we use key frames and you'll see here I've got two key frames of a ball dropping from the top of the screen to the bottom. It's not a great animation and that's because when you apply key frames, After Effects interpolates between them and After Effects is a great tweener, but After Effects cannot reason like a human being can. It doesn't know how it needs to animate between the two key frames until you tell it. So at the moment, it's just dropping and falling on the floor and I've got the speed roughly how I want it to be, so that's how long I want it to take to get from the top of the screen to the bottom of the screen. But you'll see that it's not very dynamic and that's because it's linear. So if we stop that animation and we go into the graph editor, we can see the graph. And you'll see that the y-axis is moving linearly. When I say linearly, it's moving in a straight line between two values as the crow flies. So it's going in even increments. Now very few things in real life will move like that. There's lots of things that will affect how they move. What we need to do is we need to go in between the key frames that After Effects has set and we need to help After Effects interpolate the changes in a different way. And that's what we're gonna have a look at in this chapter. I tend to call this type of animation that we do in After Effects straight to pose animation. So we start off with the post pose and we go back to straight ahead animation and we move frame by frame through the key frames.

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