Pose to Pose Research: Richard Williams

The Animators Survival Kit is an AMAZING book by Richard Williams, and it pretty much got me to where I am today. God know how my animations at Art Foundation would have turned out if I didn't have the help from this book. It's fantastic, so much so that I bought my own copy.

The book pretty much guides you through the basics of animation, as well as the main methods, principles and formulas, and it does so in a way that is easy to understand. Williams also uses sketches to help explain what he is talking about.

There were a couple of sections of the book that I found extremely useful when I was producing my pose to pose animations, but one in particular was the following:

 Wow Such Quality.

In this section of the book, Richard Williams talks about Extremes and Breakdowns and gives the swinging pendulum as an example. Now some of the information seemed fairly straight forward to me, for instance, the rope is going to stay the same length, and move in an arc rather than having the arm of the pendulum shrink, but there were parts of it that I found really useful. He goes on to talk about the principle of animation that is 'Easing In and Out' and pointed out that we can make the pendulum do this by adding more inbetweens (between our Breakdown points and Extremes), and we can make the action even slower at each end by adding in even more drawings. This was again something that I was already aware of as I had been taught about it in previous classes, but it was nice to see an example on paper to help me really get my head around it. It was a tremendous aid for me when it came to planning out my own timing and spacing for my pendulum.

Wow, Even Better.

 It was also nice to read about the pros and cons of working with Pose to Pose animation (well, according to Williams). It also helped me to fully come to grips with what the technique consists of, and how it differs from Straight Ahead animation.

To sum up, this book is amazing, and so useful, and wow. If you haven't bought it already, get it done.