Straight Ahead & Pose to Pose Animation - Principle 4

There are two methods used to animate and both have their own positives and negatives to them, but both can also be used to create a nice middle ground. Straight ahead animation is basically animating on the go, where you animate frame after frame without any use of key-framing and no real planning has been involved. This animation can be great to allow for fresh ideas to come to an animation and allows the animator to create very fast action, however if not careful the animation can end up wandering completely off track and not making much sense. With straight ahead there can be problems that you may not have seen while animating, such as a pose is off, and you will have to go back and change lots of frames to fix this. On the other hand, pose to pose animation is quite the opposite in the fact that it's very well planned and organised. The animator works out all of the key poses needed in the scene and then goes back later to fill in all the inbetweens, or sometimes gets their assistants to go back and do that job. The positives of this method is of course that its much more organised, but also allows for more control over the movement and performance of the animation. Not only this, but if a project is on a set deadline, this method allows for directors and such to see how far along progress is and work out the time schedule. So, like I stated at the beginning it is best to have both methods work together to get the best of both and I have chosen a great example below of how it can work. There has been key poses worked out for this scene below, but for the actions such as when the rabbit spins his arm round it might be better to used straight ahead so that the arm is more unpredictable.