Hi, welcome to Animation for Anyone. My name's Alex.
In today's lesson, we're going to help answer the question that every animator asks themselves hundreds of times a day. How much space should I put between these frames?
The answer will depend on two things. How fast do you want your object to move?
And whether it's speeding up, slowing down or staying constant.
The first part of this is pretty easy to answer. If you want your object to move quickly, make the spacing further apart. And if you want it to move slowly, make the spacing closer together. The second part of the question, speeding up, slowing down, or staying constant, takes a little bit more thought. It means that we need to look at the spacing of several frames to make sure we're creating the motion that we want.
So to really quickly answer that question, if you want to make your animation speed up, look at the last two frames and make your next frame further apart than them.
If you want to make your animation slow down, make your next frame closer together than those last two frames. And if you want to keep your speed constant, make your spacing the exact same as those previous two frames.
That might be the only information you're looking for right now but personally, I like to understand why things happen in animation. So for the rest of this class, I'm going to dig into those three options and try to understand them better.
And just a little warning. I like to think of some of this stuff from a slightly scientific perspective. Don't worry though, this is animation science, not like real science class science.
And just to reassure you, here's a little example of just how simple I want to keep it. Imagine I have a coin on a table and I move my finger towards it. When I touch the coin, it starts moving. We certainly wouldn't expect the coin to start moving before I touch it.
