Animation what is a breakdown

Follow Following Unfollow. Its time to break down and reverse engineer another design. This week, however, we are going to reverse engineer an animated short film! Animation can be very difficult, especially when you try to create an entire project on your own. You have to make all of the assets yourself and then take them all into a animation program like Adobe after effect. You then have to animate every single layer.

The task can be pretty daunting. You can however learn a few tricks that will make animation a whole lot more simple. To demonstrate these principals we are going to examine Lee Daniels's animated short "Clarence". So one of the things that will help you the most in animation is avoiding animating joints whenever you can. Animating joints can make movement look very realistic and amazing but takes a really long time.

Beginning animators and students often wonder how the more experienced artists can create so much footage. Well, two of the main techniques that might help you break through BOTH the quality and quantity barriers is the use of thumbnails and breakdowns.

Thumbnails are, as the name suggests, a preliminary sketch of the scene, an single static image, in which you plan out the action, timing, arcs, etc. Breakdowns are the large gaps between the keys. By placing key action on breakdowns, you can loosen up your animation, and offload a lot of your animation work onto an inbetween drawing — which is far easier than creating yet another key. I need a mentor to learn animation.

That would be as trivial as cutting out the individual images in Photoshop, importing them and animating their positions, then add a few effects for drop shadows and color corrections. The video has been set to private, but based on your other responses Have you watched through Adobe's provided tutorials?

YouTube is a sea of info, with wildly varying quality, but Adob'es stuff will get you through the basics with some clearer structure. There's also a great series here commissed by Adobe to get you familiar with a lot of the basics of the UI and workflow. Welcome to the Community! Skip Take tour. Adobe Support Community. Turn on suggestions. Auto-suggest helps you quickly narrow down your search results by suggesting possible matches as you type.

Maybe this is a silly question but what is a breakdown drawing? I always thought there were only keys and inbetweens. What does a breakdown artist do? Between keys and breakdowns, you have inbetweens. Your breakdown drawing, or pose, carries a great deal of importance; it governs the movement of whatever your animating.

It adds an extra level of control to your animation: rather than inbetweening strait from one pose to the next, you can add diversity by making your breakdown interesting.