With this ' rough pencil test' playback you can very quickly get a feel if the animation is doing what you want it to, or not. them)įinally, I would also strongly advise that you ' rough-in' your inbetweens first.

(Note: There are lots of references to 'slowing-in' and 'slowing-out' on my various animation books if you want to learn more. As you'll see, I have used a lot of ' slowing-in' and ' slowing-out' on my inbetweens - meaning that there are more inbetweens added at the beginning or end of a chart, depending on whether I wanted to accelerate to and from the keys in question. Note that the inbetweens will rarely be ' even' in their placement as most action is just not like that. You can see my charting on the ' key frames' above. When your pose test is looking good, note the number of frames linking your drawings, then number and ' chart' the inbetweens from one key to another. Review the video and adjust your pose timing as required. With those done, shoot a ' Pose Test' of the action - that is, film them on ' holds' for as many frames as you think they need when the inbetweens are added to link all the key positions. When you have identified that actions, draw on separate sheets of animation paper ' rough poses' of those positions, using the character you are working with.

Remember, a 'key' is usually the beginning and end of a particular action, as well as any important changes of direction with the action being considered. When you have your reference footage, go through it frame-by-frame and analyze the ' key' positions. (And not what they think is going on!) Shooting reference footage is so easy to do with modern phones - meaning that if you can shoot 'selfies' then you can certainly shoot 'reference footage'. Instead shoot the action they plan to animate to first, to understand what is really going on. Therefore I strongly advise all young animators to NOT animate using their imaginations alone for 99% of the time. ' I would say that without shooting reference footage of this first I could not have created the action I did.

Pencil animation test