Today I'm going to teach you how to animate from observation using four different poses. This works for anything you could possibly want to animate. Bring your art to life with Printull, where dreams meet reality. Energize your print on demand business with the design tools at printful.com. Select from a plethora of products to customize and design, including t-shirts, sling bags, hats, posters, phone cases, desk mats, mugs, you name it. Go ahead and upload your design into the editor, and you'll also get a reading on the quality of your design, as well as automatically generated mock-ups that you can use to give your customers insight into what your product will look like. Use the fully featured Printful Design Workshop to turn your animation practice sessions into a passive revenue stream. Dust off that lead holder and make those sketches look nice. Special thank you to Printull for sponsoring this video. You can learn more about them with the link in the description below. So, first I'm going to set down a tracking point. Usually the head is a pretty safe place. It looks like it goes in sort of a loop. then drops at the end. Rough path of motion. Now, the first type of pose you want to know about is the key frame. Your key frames are your main poses. They tell the story of your animation. You can think of these as the panels in a comic strip. So these are all the drawings in your animation that when viewed in a sequence, the viewer can say, "Okay, I understand what's going on here. Uh there's a backflip." I can sort of identify three of them here. Maybe we can try that. Definitely looks like one. basic slideshowesque pictures that tell you what's happening in the story. So, if you know the three fundamentals of animation, timing and spacing, mechanics, and story, we're almost attacking them backwards. So, we start with the story by establishing our key frames. Then, we're going to go next to mechanics, and then timing and spacing last when it comes to the order of our core drawings. So, let's go ahead and move on now to mechanics. And we're going to introduce our next type of pose, the extremes. Extremes are the mechanical drawings within a sequence of animations. What do I mean by mechanical? Well, the laws of motion are now going to take precedent in these type of drawings. Not only communicating a backflip or a walk cycle or a run cycle, but now solidifying the action in reality with the physics of motion. I like to make my key frames based on squash and stretch or tension and compression, whatever you want to call it. So, I just take the frames where I see that the character um is crouching the most and then also stretching the most. also get where the character is stretching the most. So, as you can see with keys and extremes, the animation already has a very nice bouncy mechanicalness to it. These poses are so easy to remember. You're committing these four types of core drawings to memory so that you can animate from imagination, which is straight ahead. Okay. So, pose to pose is the key to mastering straight ahead animation. Don't forget that. Third type of drawing I want you to know about. The third type of pose is the breakdown. Now, this animation I see that it looks really good just with keys and extremes. But don't forget that the breakdown is also an important frame as well. And I think the reason is because one of the key frames actually is a breakdown. Remember key frames can be an extreme, a breakdown. A breakdown is not a key frame. Uh an extreme is not a key frame. But a key frame can be either or because they tell the story. We really don't know what the key frame is going to be until we watch the animation. So the reason I think that this animation looks so good uh just with the keys and extremes is because this frame right here, this midair frame is actually a breakdown. Why? Because a breakdown is a transition between our two extremes or key frames. It's just a transition. So from here, there's a stretch to another stretch. Stretch to stretch. Breakdown is in the middle. Now, a breakdown, we're not totally going into timing and spacing just yet. We're bridging the gap from mechanics to timing and spacing. So, we can still add some mechanical elements in there. One thing I want to try, I don't know if I'm going to keep it yet, is I want to add this frame right here, as you can see to the left, uh because I want to show the viewer how the legs get from this midair position into this um stretched downwards dive position. Okay, so I think a breakdown is the perfect blend between um transitioning away from the mechanical part of the animation and into the timing and spacing uh without being too much of either. Does that make sense? Let's try it. And um I'm going to treat this somewhat like an in between. Spoiler alert. That's the last type of drawing by favoring this head position right here. Okay. So, I'm just going to favor that a little bit. So, put the head right there. And that's the way it is on the reference because sometimes a pose you like does not work in the composition and you got to get rid of it. But I hope we get to keep this one because I really think I mean, look at this arm position. Really cool stuff right here. This way maybe. Yeah, maybe it's more to the left than I think it is. Yeah. You see how the that brings the legs up and then you can see them kick down. It just makes the whole thing more um a little bit easier to grasp. Now that's a pretty quick frame, I imagine. Uh you know, could just be the way it's drawn that doesn't look right. As you get closer, these drawings get a bit more dangerous. You got to make sure they're accurate because they can really ruin your animation. I think that's good enough for now in the cleanup. I can definitely uh do more to it to make it look a bit cleaner. And then the last type of drawing you need to know about is the in between. We'll just call those or just twins for short. Okay. Now, that's where we get our timing and spacing in full measure. So, we're going to go back to the motion path that we drew. This can serve as our timing chart almost. So, we don't really have the timing for these uh poses yet. Yeah, this that's a dangerous pose. I might have to nyx it. Might have to get rid of it and give it over to an in between. Yeah. So, the in-betweens are our final uh movement drawings. Okay. So, now we can plan those out a little bit better. Now we have this great motion path. So we kind of have this here. What's between here and here? I think going downwards, right? Going downwards, you know, just your typical speed up. A lot of animators call that, I believe, an ease in or an ease out. I don't use either of those terms. I'm actually going to use speed up and slow down cuz that's uh according to timing, which will stay consistent no matter what you do. Okay. Okay, now going back upwards. So these little lines I'm putting these are my drawings. Okay, these are drawings that I'm going to make. And they're approximate. Okay, I haven't timed these out yet. I just kind of want what what's the flow going to be like? You know, what's the what's the um what's what type of motion is going to be employed. So going from here to here right now, we're going to be having the it's going to be speeding up again. Okay, here and here. I don't think there really should be many inbetweens because the speed is so is is at such a high level. Maybe you could just make one as a constant motion frame. So that's not exactly constant motion right there. But yeah, it it'll probably be something constant. So between here and here, just a halfway position like that. The breakdown is serving as an in between here. That's that's a dangerous animation move. Very dangerous. Use it sparingly. Um know what you're doing. be cognizant of it at all times. So, we just want to slow down at this point. Okay. Boom. And then down. Down. I'm just going to want to when going back down, I just want to ease in um ease out or speed up slow down. Okay. Speed up, slow down, that kind of deal. Going downwards and then back up. Shooting back up afterwards. Um you're going to slow down at the end. So, not so hard. All right. So, I'm not going to draw these in-betweens today. If you want to learn more about inbetweens, I want you to click on this video right here. It's going to teach you all about what you need to know about inbetweens, the difference between frames per second and drawings per second. Biggest takeaway from this video is your four types of drawings for pose to pose animation, which will help you master straight ahead animation. That can be our next video topic. uh key frames, extremes, breakdowns, inbetweens. These four types of drawings run the entire gamut of the animation fundamentals. Starting with the story, working backwards, remember? So, we start with story, then we go to mechanics, mechanics, and then obviously timing and spacing. So, inbetweens are timing and spacing, breakdowns, mechanics, and timing and spacing. extremes are full-on mechanics. Story is all key frames. Do you see that? If you want to learn about the three fundamentals of animation, click this video here. We're going to have like 500 videos linked. I'm going to link them all in the description because this is core animation knowledge. You have to know these things in order to animate straight ahead, which is from your imagination, which is faster and more fun and more professional. And overall, it makes you feel like you're an animator. Special thanks to Printull for sponsoring this video. Go check out Printull with the link in the description so you can get your print on demand business off the ground and into the air. If you want a deep dive into how Printful work, check out this video here. That's all from me, guys. I'll see you all in the next one. Peace.