After taking a break from my regularly scheduled posts to focus on the animation challenge, I’m back with another little exercise! I’m still keeping things pretty simple with these, with the focus being on one or two animation principles. This time around, as the title suggests, I animated a throw.

I created this animation way back in 2020. At the time, I was still finding my bearings when it came to full body animation. Up until then, I’d mostly been animating with either simplified character rigs or just focusing on a character’s upper body and head. But completing this animation gave me a bit more confidence to experiment more with detailed bipedal characters.

The main focus here was on anticipation. I briefly mentioned anticipation before in my post about animating a head take. If animation is just another form of communication, then you need to make sure your message is clear! No matter how simple or complex the motion is, if the viewer can’t follow the action, how are they meant to understand the character?

This is where anticipation comes into play. If a character is about to make a big movement, there should be some way for the viewer to telegraph this action before it happens. There should be some sort of contrasting movement that allows the character to prepare for the action while simultaneously allowing the viewer to prepare visually.

In the case of the head take animation, before the character popped her head upward, she compresses herself downward in anticipation.

In the case of the throwing animation, the bear does a big wind up before launching their arm forward. They bring their arm back, creating a totally different pose than the one you see when the ball leaves their hand. This contrasting pose not only provides some nice visual interest, but also helps keep the motion clear and readable.

When comparing the head take and throwing animations, the timing and contrast of the anticipation really varies. And that’s okay! Some actions need more anticipation than others. Some need barely any at all! In fact, experimenting with the length and exaggeration of an action’s anticipation can have fun and unexpected results. As long as the view can follow the flow of the motion, you’re golden!

There are several more exercises that I have coming up which feature different kinds of anticipation. But all in all I’m satisfied with how this throwing animation turned out!

I’d like to give a big shout out and thanks to animator Philipp Dörl for providing me with some extremely helpful feedback during the process of creating this. You can see his notes and an earlier version of this animation over on SyncSketch. Thanks for reading!

Koala Bob Rig by fRigging Awesome Studios
Ruby Rig by Amine Kefi

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