Hello everyone, today I want to offer some information about tweening in animation, along with a few other animation tips.
Tweening
In animation, tweening is when an image is slightly edited with each frame to form eventual movements. Some examples of tweening are ears moving, head nodding, or tail wagging.
Usually tweening is when certain parts of a character or subject are drawn on separate layers from the body, so in other frames the parts can be moved slightly to create movement without changing the position of the body.
If your animation program has a lasso tool, use it to select the part you are going to tween, and make sure you are on the layer that that part is on. If your program has a sort of crosshairs, when something is selected move the crosshairs to a point where the part that is going to be tweened and the rest of the subject connect, then copy that part. Then you can paste it to the next frame, and move the part slightly, repeating this process over multiple frames, to create a tweened animation. There is also frame by frame animation, where each individual frame is drawn completely separately from one another. Frame by frame can be more time consuming because you have to draw things over and over again.
I also have a few more animation tips to share with you, even if you do not tween when animating.
Frames
When animating, you should make key frames that the rest of your frames stem from, even if you have to add a lot of frames in-between the key frames.
When animating dynamic movements, make frames in between the key frames that show anticipation. This is similar to how a roller coaster going up slowly is anticipating reaching the top before going downwards very fast.
Sometimes distorting a frame can be helpful, especially when you want to show fast movements in the animation. Distorted frames are often called smear frames, and they can be weird or funny. However, they can be important. They are usually hand drawn frames and can act similar to motion blur when implemented properly. There is no right or wrong way to make smear frames. However, you do need to make sure the smear frames follow the movements you are trying to create. You can also implement squash and stretch in your smear frames. Squash and stretch is used to make shapes that can be distorted to show emphasis. The most common form of squash and stretch is a bouncy ball, specifically how it squashes and stretches when it bounces. However, squash and stretch is not always needed.
While animating, you should play the work in progress animation to catch any errors or odd moments and fix them accordingly. When new frames are made, I suggest using onion skin (if your animation program has it) to check your frames to make sure they stay consistent and not so far apart that the animation gets weird.
You should also pay attention to timing, especially if you are creating an animation meme, an animated music video, or an animation that goes with audio in general. Even without audio, you should still pay attention to timing your animation properly.
Here’s an animation I made that is composed of tweening.
Enjoy tweening, and I’ll “see” you soon in our virtual art world!
Peace and love,
Mikayla