Name: 2. Anticipation - 12 Principles of Animation
Uploaded: 2017-08-25T05:36:00.000Z
Duration: 2 min 36 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Basic passive voice

This video is based on the Twelve
Principles of Animation, as described by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston

Alright the 2nd principle of animation
is called Anticipation.

This is when a character prepares for an
action to give the audience a clue as to what is happening next

as well as to make the action appear
more realistic.

One example is when a character is about
to jump.

Before leaping into the air, he has to prepare for the action by crouching down to build energy.

It's like a spring that coils
up before releasing.

Look at this character jumping without any
anticipation.

It looks very unrealistic because the energy to jump comes out of nowhere.

To add power to the punch, and communicate to the viewers that he
is about to punch,

he reaches his arm back, and then punches.

By contrast, having no anticipation results in a very weak punch.

Before running, a character will wind up before taking off.

In the previous video about squash and stretch,

this face actually uses anticipation as
well.

Instead of immediately stretching up the face squashes first to anticipate
the stretch and give it more power.

Anticipation helps communicate actions
to the audience by preparing them for the next action

If a character is about to take something out of their pocket

they make their hand very visible, and up
in the air, before going into the pocket

otherwise the audience might miss it and
wonder how they got that object in the first place

The most important thing is that the
viewer notices the hand and the pocket

so the character cannot be performing
any competing actions.

Let's say that something is about to happen on the right.

A character may prepare for that action
by pointing their eyes and head to look in that direction,

It's important to make it as easy as possible for the audience to understand what's going on,

But this can also be used to trick the audience too

if you lead their eyes in one direction
and then surprised them by having  something happen on the other side of the screen

Taking anticipation a step further you
can actually have multiple levels of anticipation.

Let's go back to our punch
animation where the character winds up before punching

This animation has one level of
anticipation

the character is actually winding up for
his windup

and then before punching, he throws his other arm back to further anticipate the punch

It's actually similar to what a baseball pitcher does when he's getting ready to throw the ball

alright that's all I've
got for Anticipation

So thanks for watching
and I'll see you guys in the next video!