Class 1 / Week 6: Overlapping Action

Week 6 was another fun yet challenging assignment! We were introduced to another principle of animation: Overlapping Action. This principle is the essential ingredient for making your animation feel "organic"by breaking up the movement so not everything happens at the same time.

For this week's assignment we had to create an animation of a pendulum with it's root or main body moving from side to side or in a "Figure 8" motion and animate the overlapping action and successive breaking of joints on the pendulum.

Here are some of the terms that go hand in hand when creating Overlapping Action :

Overlap: Not all parts of the body start their movements at the same time. Each part of the body is affected by the part that is directly above them in a hierarchy. Example: shoulder, upper arm, lower, arm, wrist and fingers. Not everything happens at the same time, once sections of the body leads as the others follow and so on. This is also called: Successive Breaking of Joints

Follow Through: generated by external forces such as weight, wind, gravity etc. For example tails, ears, hair and cloth. This can be animated once the main animation is done.

Drag: Also called as the Wave Principle. As the base or the main body moves the rest of the pieces will follow with a certain amount of drag until it catches up with the movement. The amount of drag depends on the speed and weight of the object in movement.

Lead and Follow: One object leads as the others parts are pulled behind.

*It is important to understand that all of this principles work closely together as a family and one cannot happen without the other.

My friend Lucas from Class 1 wrote a great post on his blog with lots of detailed information and illustrations on Overlapping Action. Make sure to check it out!

Here are my planning sketches and final animations after revisions.

Cheers! :)