01.    Squash and Stretch

This technique was primarily used to exaggerate weight, gravity, impact etc. The technique relies on your understanding of weight distribution when manipulating the object or character during its transition or transformation.
 
 

02.   Anticipation

Anticipation is used in animation to prepare the audience for an object or character to perform an action or task. Such as before kicking a ball, you would expect to see a range a movement before the foot connects.
 
 

03.   Staging

Staging is about viewer engagement through audience viewing perspective or movement. Ensuring the audience’s focus is always kept on what is relevant and tuning out what is not. This can be seen in a similar way to photography, with the use of focus to draw the attention appropriately.

 

04.   Straight ahead action and pose to pose
The technique refers to the two different ways to animate an objects or character’s transition. Pose to pose focuses on mapping the starting pose, end pose, and a couple of key poses in between. Then the animator fills in the gaps between poses. On the other side, straight ahead action simply works through each frame from start to finish. Often these techniques are combined depending on what kind of feel the animator is going for in the scene.

05.   Follow through and overlapping action
Follow through is the visual representation of momentum and how it shows energy and trajectory in an object. Overlapping action is the use of secondary and tertiary animations such as when a character is swimming their arms and legs will be overlapping actions versus their head animation.
 
 

06.   Slow in and slow out
This is the method of adding more frames at the start and finish of the animation, giving a flow of motion throughout that starts with a build up and fades out.
  

07.   Arc
Using the Arc technique is simply allowing physics to exist when handling an object that is thrown in a direction in your animation. The principle behind it is to ensure the object’s path is one the audience can believe.

08.   Secondary action
The use of an animation to emphasise the main animation. This can be seen with moments like when a cat knocks over a vase on a shelf as it struts by. The cat would be the primary animation, the vase would be secondary.
 
 

09.   Timing
This is more of a concept of audience engagement. If you define objects behave a certain way you either need to be consistent or reflect what is known in the real world. If we use the real world as a definition, objects that have heavy mass will be slower to start pushing, pick up momentum as they are moved with enough force, then fade out as it comes to a stop.
 
 

10.   Exaggeration
As with anything that is exaggerated, to do so in animation is to push the boundaries of perceived reality and limitations. Commonly seen in something like Spiderman, with all of his poses something you would see a gymnastics professional doing, all while fighting bad guys.
 
 

11.   Solid drawing
The concept behind solid drawing is simply to be able to construct a world in 3D and keep it consistent. Like defining an adventure animation in space with a set structure to the space craft interior and weight of actions with reduced gravity.
 
 

12.   Appeal
The final value for animation is around audience engagement, from the initial marketing to the full production, there needs to be something about your animation that makes it easy to like but also have its own characteristics. There is no set way to achieve this and steps more into the realms of screenwriting.