Aaron Blaise's Fundamentals of Animation Course: Animation Demonstration Video, Slow In and Slow Out Video, and Staging Video

Today, I watched the rest of Aaron Blaise's Animation Demonstration. I watched as he used the squash and stretch method during his inbetweens. He said you can create some awesome squash and stretch during your inbetweens to really push your drawings. He said the magic of animation happens even more once you get all your hard work done and get to your inbetweens. The animation starts coming to life even more than you imagined it. Inbetweens should go pretty quick just get them done fast and accurately as my old huntington professor would say :). Aaron reminded me that be sure your keys are precise and then with your breakdowns should be and then inbetweens are a little more loose and fast. Definitely work loosely he says. He encouraged to push your drawings as much as possible. You want to be able to read your animation well and if it is a lip sync you want to see and read those lips well. Aaron adds inbetweens based on the timeline when he feels there should be one and this is interesting it makes the process seem more focused then just adding drawings. He gives a lot of life to his demonstrations making the process seem more interesting than I used to perceive it to be.
The next fundamental video that I watched today was, the Slow in and Slow out video. In this lesson, Aaron explained in more detail what slow in and slow out is within animation. Aaron said that anytime he is animating a character on the screen whether they are walking or whatever that you want to create a slow start and a slow ending to your animations. This mean that there is a slow beginning and a slow ending to your next pose. This can even apply to film in a sense as well. He says that slow ins and slow outs help it from starting harshly and stopping harshly. This creates a nice soft edge to your animations and this is the term animator's tend to use known as "Fluidity".
He said that when you create your slow ins and slow outs you start with nice tightly spaced drawings and the animation speed picks up then as its slowing down you get more nicely tight spaced drawings to end it. He says out of all the animation fundamentals this is the most used he says. He said the only time he does not use slow ins and slow outs is when a character is fighting, thrown or shot out of a canon and so on. It is not used with abrupt fast actions.

The next fundamental video that I watched was Aaron's Staging video. In this lesson, I learned more about what staging is and approach it properly. Staging is an approach to animation where you focus on how you "stage" or portray your character or scene to your viewer. You can do this in a few ways: your camera location and your character's position in relation to their location. Aaron said that you want to convey your character or scene in the best way possible for your viewer. He gave me a few examples. He explained about having 2 characters on screen, how to portray a dominant character, a desolate background with a character, lonely characters, and compressed backgrounds. The biggest thing you want to ask yourself Aaron says is : What is the action or emotion that needs to be conveyed here? He said the further your character gets on screen -the broader your action has to be. You can exaggerate moments, make things subtle by framing things tighter to get more subtext, and ideas can be more broad by accurate staging. It was a great lesson, short but straight to the key points!