Pose to Pose and Frame by Frame Research

Most of the time these two factors tend to go hand in hand when it comes to animating (With the exception of straight ahead styled animations), I especially needed to use these two when I worked on both my photoshop (Frame by frame) and hand drawn (Pose to pose) animation studio tasks, so why not combine the two into one post?

By drawing in the key poses first, this works as a useful guide and gives you a proper idea on how you can draw out the rest of your animations from there as well as have better control over the animation's timing, especially when following a storyboard. You will probably notice the difference between an animation that uses the pose to pose technique and one that uses the straight ahead principle instead (The latter tends to look a lot more rubbery, and sometimes smoother than a planned animation).

Looney Tunes (Pose to Pose)

Bjork (Straight Ahead)

Once the key poses (Also called Extremes) are drawn in, it's time to smoothen out the animation by putting in the in-between frames it is also easier to decide from there how fast or slow you want an animation to move, by putting in less frames or by putting in more. Normally an arc guide is also used next to create the wanted flow of movement (And this pretty much applies to everything, even a finger raising to point at something).

The pendulum animation is a perfect example of how pose to pose and frame by frame is applied (Especially since, as I mentioned at the beginning, had to use them both for my digital and traditional pendulum animations) as well as the arc line guide .

While 12 frames are normally drawn for each second, you'd be surprised how smooth animations can be even with fewer frames, here is a great site that breaks down a variety of animations and show them as references for animation timing (Though if you have a Mac, you can open gif files in Preview and see how many frames one tends to contain, I tend to do that a lot):

http://framexframe.tumblr.com

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