Ok, so I've written a lot about poses and how important they are and haven't been discussing animation directly. So let's break this inertia and get started! :-)
This will be a short post to discuss the main stages of animation. What you saw up there was my first animation from 2010 (yay!). So how did I get there?
First I chose the theme for the animation: a magician that gets very confident after putting on his hat and that notices he's being followed by a creature and performs a magic trick on it. Then I had to gather reference for it and, of course, I acted it out so it was just what I wanted it to be.
Next, thumbnailing. I went through the reference video frame by frame, identifying the key poses. This really helps organize the main ideas of the shot, chose the key poses and define the timing roughly. The first page of the planning can be seen below.
As you can see, it's not very elaborate, but helped guide me through the process. It makes the next step a lot easier. Now we start the software and get the main poses in there. This is the blocking stage. No worries about having a smooth animation, about breakdowns or in-betweens. But get the timing right. Here's my blocking:
And now...I added the breakdowns, adjusted the tangents, corrected some poses and incorporated the comments my mentor (and peers) gave me. Oh, actually, each step incorporates the critique I got on the one before. This stage is called blocking plus.
Ok, I know this was extremely superficial, but that's why I called it a simple introduction to the animation process. :-)
