A Thousand Drawings

Before I knew anything about animation other than it contained of silly cartoon characters on a screen, I would have never guessed that so much effort and time went into it. It wasn't until later in high school did I figure out just how much time and effort.
I created a very short animated video for my English class my senior year of high school. It's seventeen seconds long and the most frustrated seventeen seconds I've ever had to create in my life. I just about pulled my hair out by the end of it. It consisted of 347 frames (not all animated) and I spent an entire weekend on it. This is basically child's play for any professional animator, but for someone who had never done anything like it, I was subjected to nearly giving up. However, my only motivation was the outcome of how it would look. I felt extremely accomplished and proud of myself by the end of it even if it wasn't anything as smooth as a Disney film. There was a point where I practically bawled because a good chunk of my animation was deleted without me saving it, but thank god my dad was able to recover it. I learned that saving your work at every chance is a life savor for those who animate on the computer.
In short, animating is downright HARD. Nevertheless, the outcome is why animators continue to do it. Animation is so beautiful and it's an art form that continues to be perfected by passionate artists. The image above is a series of frames put together to demonstrate a walk cycle. Most animators start with walk cycles and the classic ball bounce to get the hang of how animation works. Still, there's still so many things added in that makes the figure look alive.
What's so crazy is that there are literally hundreds of frames/pages of drawings used to create only a few seconds of animation. The drawing I posted looks like a jumbled mess of body parts, but when captured on film, it creates an illusion to the eye that the picture is moving. I'm not going to go into the whole history of animation, but know that speed and light is what captures that illusion. To break it down, animators will draw up certain prominent poses of a figure to get the gist of the movement they are about to make; a character will move from point A to point B. Then something called in-betweens are used to create that fluidity of the action so that it doesn't look all jerky and robotic. In-betweens are those extra drawings added between the prominent poses. That's why there is so many poses in the drawing above. Whether it's through flash animation on a computer or with a flipbook, every single frame is accounted for and recorded together.
There are a lot of techniques animators use to amplify the movement of the characters. I'll just talk about one of those techniques for today. Squash and stretch is one if not the most important principle of animation. Squash and stretch are very exaggerated drawings from the in-betweens of a figure. It conveys the shape of that figure in action. If an old man is shaking his head back and forth, his jowls may be stretched out during a shake and brought back across his face so as to emphasize the movement. A bouncing ball is a great example of this. When a ball is bouncing, the shape stretches as it soars upward, remains it's circular form at the peak of it's height, and squashes down nearly flat when it hits the ground. This demonstrates the different forms that partake in fast paced movements. These are shapes that very much exist in the real world, but are difficult to see due to the momentum that carries it.
Wow, I've only scratched the surface of how animating is done, but I'm going to go ahead and stop here. I'm glad that a lot of animators are becoming recognized and people are taking a lot more interest in it nowadays than before. Up next: Traditional vs. computer animation!