Four Principles of Animation

Time is a material that has to be used as carefully as color, shape, line. When you compose in time, you are designing an experience for the audience: telling a story, creating anticipation, and delivering surprise.

Learn more: Twelve Principles of Animation (video, 24 minutes)

Loops

There are a few ways to think about Loops in animation, and a few ways to make them. A well designed loop animation can create the illusion of continuity. That means that time appears to be moving forward continuously, not repeating, as the loop repeats. For an example, at Coub.com look the animation on the top banner (Giraffe heads walking by), Dog Morpheus in the Car Dog Morpheus in the Car by PevenFactory, Stayin’ Duck by Andrey Odeyalov, or Somewhere Else by Ardenis Sunset. These animations appear to endure, because the action portrayed is continuous, and the point when the loop repeats is not obvious. Contrast those clips with Vaporfall by Tundra-4-0 https://coub.com/view/tuj0p. Vaporfall shows a single event with a beginning and end that repeats. We know we are seeing the same thing happen over and over again. It is a clever animation, but it can’t be used to create a sense of continuous time in the same way the previous examples can.

The production of longer animations often use repeated loops for efficiency. For example, in Somewhere Else, a two second loop of the person standing on the train could be played for 20 seconds, while the background goes by on a different layer. That background could show mountains, then a town, then a city. In this way the two second animation of the person becomes part of a much longer story. Audio can also extend the perceived sense of time going by. Add an audio track to Somewhere Else, for example an interior monologue, train noise or overheard conversations between passengers off-screen. Now this two second animation can be extended for as long as the audio can hold the viewer's attention.

Image Sequence

An Image Sequence is a folder of JPG or PNG images that are meant to be shown in order. To create an animation or video out of an Image Sequence, the image files must be named sequentially. That means that the file titles automatically sort your image in the order you want them to be in the animation. It's best to have them numbered (001, 002, 003, etc.). The files must also be exactly the same pixel dimension. A folder organized this way can be uploaded to many types of programs, including Photoshop and After Effects, to create an animation.

GIFs

GIF is an image file type that includes the dimension of time, and generally loops indefinitely when opened in a browser. This makes it a great way to share short animations and video, and to experiment with creating the illusion of continuity. GIFs compress by reducing the number of colors in an image. So they are ideal for flat color images, such as many vector images. GIFs are not ideal for photographic images that are rich in color, or for gradients, which may show as bands of color. GIFs can include transparency.

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