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PRINCIPLES OF ANIMATION
1 Squash and stretch 7 Arcs
2 Anticipation 8 Secondary action
3 Staging 9 Timing
4 Straight ahead action and pose to 10 Exaggeration
pose 11 Solid drawing
5 Follow through and overlapping 12 Appeal
action
6 Slow in and slow out

Squash and stretch

This is probably the most important rule of
animation: it refers to the natural
deformation, weight and flexibility of
objects.
It's a phenomenon we can observe in real
life, watching a ball bounce, for example.
If you apply a lot of squash and stretch,
you'll get a cartoon-type of animation,
pleasing to the eye, often wanted in motion
design video.
Rigidity
The most important animation principle is called squash and stretch. When an
object moves, its movement indicates the rigidity of the object. Many real world
objects have little flexibilty, such as furniture, however most organic objects have
some level of flexibility in their shape.

Volume
When a person smiles, the shape of the face is determined by the movement of muscles
underneath a layer of skin. During a smile, though the head seems to increase in size, with
the widening of the mouth and jaw, it does not.
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Anticipation
Anticipation is the rule of animation where you introduce a movement by another
one.
For example, a baseball player, before throwing the ball, will prepare for the action
by moving his arm back (and in fact his whole body will take a special "pose").
This allows you to prepare your audience for what will happen next and get a more
"realistic" impact. In motion design, for example, if you want to animate a rotating
object, make a slight rotation in the opposite

Staging
Staging is the presentation of an idea so that it is clear. This idea can be an action, a
personality, an expression, or a mood. The key idea is that the idea is made clear to
the viewer.
An important objective of staging is to lead the viewers eye to where the action will
occur so that they do not miss anything.
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Straight Ahead and Pose to Pose

These are two different ways to animate something. "Straight ahead" animation
is when you animate a character or something as it is moving, like when you
move in real life, you animate it frame by frame, without a plan.
On the other hand, "pose-to-pose" animation is when you begin by placing the
most important states, or "keyframes" of your animation, creating the transition
between two keyframes.
That way, you have a preview of what your animation will look like without
having to animate the whole thing.

Follow through and overlapping action

These are two ways of drawing animation. Straight ahead action is where you draw each
frame of an action one after another as you go along. With pose-to-pose, you draw the
extremes – that is, the beginning and end drawings of action – then you go on to the
middle frame, and start to fill in the frames in-between.

Slow in and slow out

When you start your car, you don’t get up to 60 mph right away. It takes a little
while to accelerate and reach a steady speed. In animation speak, we would call
this an Ease Out.
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Arcs

Here we are talking about the trajectory of your animated element through time.
An arched trajectory really helps when it comes to the realism and the impact of
your animation,as the movement appears smoother and gentler.

Secondary action
It's always good to add some secondary animation to your character/object.
For example, a female character running will have her hair moving according to the
speed of her run.
A secondary action is an action that results directly from another action.
Secondary actions are important in heightening interest and adding a realistic
complexity to the animation.
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Timing
Timing and spacing in animation is what gives objects and characters the
illusion of moving within the laws of physics. Timing refers to the number of
frames between two poses.

Appeal
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The difference between appealing animation and unappealing animation is not limited to subject
matter, what matters is how you present the ideas, concepts, and emotional highs/lows to the
audience—it’s about presentation. Learn more about this incredibly important principle from
mentor and Disney Toon Studios animator Ethan Hurd!
Here we are talking about the charisma of your animation.
If we we’re talking about an actor, we would refer to it as their acting ‘game’.
If you want something to be positive, design it with the appropriate features: a
smile, round shapes, light colors… and if you want to express a bad thing, use de-
saturated dark and sad colors, mad eyes, spikes, triangle and square shapes.

Keyframing
Keyframing is the ability to change parameter values for added effects smoothly within a video
clip. This increases the range of possibilities for using effects in projects.
Studiohas the ability to use keyframes with RTFX plugins. You can set different
keyframes as often as you like throughout a clip. Each keyframe can have new
sets of parameters. Between each keyframe, numeric parameter values are
automatically adjusted to adjust from frame to frame to connect the keyframe
values smoothly. Keyframing for RTFX plugins can be activated by checking the
Use Keyframes box in the lower left of the effect properties window.

Here is an example of how you might want to use keyframing. Take a 15 second
long video clip with a Blur effect applied to it. Maybe you dont want the amount
of blur to be consistent throughout the whole clip. With keyframing you can set
reference points throughout the clip with different amounts of blur at each point.
For this example lets say there are 4 keyframe points set.

1st keyframe at 00.00A lot of blur

2nd keyframe at 05.00No blur

3rd keyframe at 10.00No blur

4th keyframe at 15.00A lot of blur

Here is how it would look on the timeline:

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Image
An image is a visual representation of something. In information technology, the
term has several usages:

1) An image is a picture that has been created or copied and stored in electronic
form. An image can be described in terms of vector graphics or raster graphics.
An image
stored in raster form is sometimes called a bitmap. An image map is a file
containing information that associates different locations on a specified image
with hypertext links.
Common image file formats online include:

 JPEG (pronounced JAY-peg) is a graphic image file produced according to

a standard from the Joint Photographic Experts Group, an ISO/IEC group
of experts that develops and maintains standards for a suite of
compression algorithms for computer image files. JPEGs usually have a
.jpg file extension.

 GIF (pronounced JIF by many, including its designer; pronounced GIF

with a hard G by many others) stands for Graphics Interchange Format.
The GIF uses the 2D raster data type and is encoded in binary. GIF files
ordinarily have the .gifextension.

 GIF89a is an animated GIF image, formatted according to GIF Version

89a. One of the chief advantage format is the ability to create an animated
image that can be played after transmitting to a viewer page that moves -
for example, a twirling icon or a banner with a hand that waves or letters
that magically get larger. A GIF89a can also be specified for interlaced
GIF presentation.

 PNG (pronounced ping ) is a Portable Network Graphics) is a file format

for image compression that was designed to provide a number of
improvements over the GIF format. Like a GIF, a PNG file is compressed
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in lossless fashion (meaning all image information is restored when the
file is decompressed during viewing). Files typically have a .png extension.

 SVG is Scalable Vector Graphics, the description of an image as an

application of XML. Any program such as a browser that recognizes XML
can display the image using the information provided in the SVG format.
Scalability means that the file can be viewed on a computer display of any
size and resolution, whether the small screen of a smartphone or a large
widescreen display in a PC. Files usually have .svgextension.

 TIFF (Tag Image File Format) is a common format for exchanging raster
graphics (bitmap) images between application programs, including those
used for scanner images. A TIFF file can be identified as a file with a .tiff
or ".tif" file name suffix.

2) A disk image is a copy of the entire contents of a storage device, such as a hard
drive or DVD. The disk image represents the content exactly as it is on the
original storage device, including both data and structure information.

3) Another use of the term image is for a section of random access memory
(RAM) that has been copied to another memory or storage location.

JPEG Image Compression

What is Image Compression?
The objective of image compression is to reduce irrelevant and redundant image
data in order to be able to store or transmit data in an efficient form.

Types:
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Overview
• JPEG, which stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group (the name of the
committee that created the JPEG standard) is a lossy compression algorithm for
images.

• A lossy compression scheme is a way to inexactly represent the data in the image,
such that less memory is used yet the data appears to be very similar. This is why
JPEG images look almost the same as the original
images they were derived from most of the time, unless the quality is reduced
significantly, in which case there will be visible differences.

• The JPEG algorithm takes advantage of the fact that humans can't see colours at
high frequencies. These high frequencies are the data points in the image that are
eliminated during the compression. JPEG compression also works best on images
with smooth colour transitions.

What is JPEG compression?

JPEG is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images. The
degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a tradeoff between storage size
and image quality with a compression ratio 10:1; but with little perceptible loss
in image quality.

Why JPEG?
JPEG uses transform coding, it is largely based on the following observations:
– A large majority of useful image contents change relatively slowly across
images, i.e., it is unusual for intensity values to alter up and down several times
in a small area, for example, within an 8 x 8 image block. A translation of this
fact into the spatial frequency domain, implies, generally, lower spatial
frequency components contain more information than the high frequency
components which often correspond to less useful details and noises.
– Experiments suggest that humans are more immune to loss of higher spatial
frequency components than loss of lower frequency components. Human vision is
insensitive to high frequency components.
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Image enhancement: contrast enhancement

Image enhancement techniques have been widely used in many applications of
image processing where the subjective quality of images is important for human
interpretation. Contrast is an important factor in any subjective evaluation of
image quality. Contrast is created by the difference in luminance reflected from
two adjacent surfaces. In other words, contrast is the difference in visual
properties that makes an object distinguishable from other objects and the
background. In visual perception, contrast is determined by the difference in the
colour and brightness of the object with other objects. Our visual system is more
sensitive to contrast than absolute luminance; therefore, we can perceive the
world similarly regardless of the considerable changes in illumination conditions.
Many algorithms for accomplishing contrast enhancement have been developed
and applied to problems in image processing.

contrast stretching
A high-contrast image spans the full range of gray-level values; therefore, a
lowcontrast image can be transformed into a high-contrast image by remapping
or stretching the gray-level values such that the histogram spans the full range.
The contrast stretch is often referred to as the dynamic range adjustment (DRA).
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where the INT function returns the integer value. If we wish to remap the image
to a gray-level range defined by a new minimum GL′min and a new maximum
defined by GL′max, the linear transform (Fig. 9.6) can be generalized to

Histogram Equalization.
Histogram Equalizationis a computer image processing technique used to improve
contrast in images. ... This allows for areas of lower local contrast to gain a higher contrast.
A color histogram of an image represents the number of pixels in each type of color
component.
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Smoothing and Median filtering

Smoothing is often used to reduce noise within an image or to produce a less

pixelated image. Most smoothing methods are based on low pass filters. See Low
Pass Filtering for more information.

Smoothing is also usually based on a single value representing the image, such
as the average value of the image or the middle (median) value. The following
examples show how to smooth using average and middle values:

 Smoothing with Average Values

 Smoothing with Median Values
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