Learn to Animate! Complete Guide to Animation Principles – Siobhan Twomey

This is a beginner’s guide to animation. You will learn everything you need to know in order to be able to animate objects, text, and even characters.

If you want to learn how to animate from scratch, you can start right here with this course. I’ve made this course for complete beginners, so if you’ve never heard of a key frame or you don’t know what a timing chart is, then this course is for you. I also think this course will be great for anyone who has a fair idea of animation, someone who is a beginner animator, and has been using software to make things move around, but who would like to really know the fundamentals and core principles in order to bring their animation to the next level.

These core principles of animation will set you up for life as an animator. You will learn step by step how to create realistic and appealing motion; plus you’ll learn why specific animation techniques effectively bring objects to life. And importantly you’ll learn when to apply them to your work.

I use Adobe Animate in this course to teach you how to animate. But there are free options that you can use to follow along; and I cover these options in the first part of the course. What you’ll be studying is basic frame by frame hand drawn animation. This is the best way to learn these principles. And don’t worry if you think that you can’t draw, we are working with basic shapes to animate – to literally bring those shapes to life.

What’s covered in this course

Whether you want to ultimately work in 3D, motion graphics or 2D animtion, you will need to know the things like

easing in and out of key frames

how to create an ease,

why you need to do that – and when you should apply it.

You’ll also learn skills that will not only make you an animator, but will make sure you are a really good animator – skills such as

timing and spacing

squash and stretch

working in arcs

working with timing charts

how to animate with anticipation, overshoot and settle