Blocking

The first stage of animation production is called blocking. This is where you create the key poses of your animation.

• Key Poses need to clearly define your characters actions. They are the poses that describe the important physical movements and emotional moments in the scene.
• Key poses are some times called extremes. Push your key poses to the extreme. Exaggerate each pose so it reads better. Make a happy pose more happy, make a sad pose more sad.
• Consider squash and stretch. Even if your rig doesnt allow stretching or scaling of the limbs you can add a level of squash and stretch through your key poses.
• Consider the line of action through your character on each key pose.
• Pay attention to your characters silhouette. Good key poses should be readable just by their silhouette.
• Work with stepped keys. Change the default key type in the preferences menu under animation.
• Key all your animation controls on each of your key frames.
• Start off using the timings from your video reference. After your first pass of blocking is complete use the graph editor to slide around your keys to adjust the timings. Add in more anticipation, hold for longer in the air etc.

A blog post by Sean Kelly on Blocking:

https://blog.animationmentor.com/5-key-steps-for-effective-blocking/

Some examples of good blocking:

Pushing the pose

A demonstration by Marlon Nowe of pushing a key pose to be much more interesting

How to Animate

This is a great series of videos by Alessandro Camporota taking a shot from start to finish

Graph Editor

The graph editor is an essential tool for controlling your animation in maya.

We will cover its uses as we progress through each stage of animation but for the purposes of blocking we just need to know how to change our key types from spline to linear to stepped. And how to select and move keys.

The following article explains the features of the graph editor in great detail

https://create3dcharacters.com/maya-animation-graph-editor-fundamentals/

The following Lynda tutorial gives a brief overview of the features

ANIMATION PRINCIPLES:

Squash and Stretch

Gives a sense of weight and flexibility to drawn objects. It can be applied to simple objects, like a bouncing ball, or more complex constructions, like the human face. The most important aspect of this principle is the fact that an object's volume does not change when squashed or stretched. If the length of a ball is stretched vertically, its width needs to contract correspondingly.

Anticipation

Anticipation is used to prepare the audience for an action. Bending knees before jumping or swinging arm back before throwing a ball. It can also refer to preparing the audience for something about to happen - such as a character looking off-screen to anticipate someone's arrival.

Straight Ahead and Pose to Pose

These are two different approaches to the actual drawing process. "Straight ahead action" scenes are animated frame by frame from beginning to end, while "pose to pose" involves starting with drawing a few key frames, and then filling in the intervals later.

Animation Brief

Acting