Anticipation

This is essential to learn how to create this affect as it attracts the audience’s attention to the right part of the screen that the animator wants them to focus on. Although the audience will essentially be individuals the human brain works in the same predictable way in this circumstance. If there are a variety of objects on the screen all moving at the same pace accept one the human eye will be drawn to the exception. This makes it important for anticipation to occur, especially an action passes very quickly as they may miss it. In some cases only the anticipation action can be enough to create the sense of what is about to happen for an audience to accept it. It is ok for them to wonder why an action is happening but there should be no shadow of a doubt as to what action is being carried out.
Almost all actions begin with suspense of that action, such as a character pulling back and throwing something, and therefore strengthen that movement. Sometimes this is initiated by a pause, or is a necessity for the action to be able to happen. This is not always the case though, as sometimes it may be a person’s mannerisms. It prepares the audience for what is about to happen in the scene. If you over do this anticipation, it could result in a very cartoon-like animation piece, especially if it is exaggerated. This is clearly shown in films before sound, where the animators had to exaggerate all the movement to make the storylines and emotions easier to read by adding extra clarity.
Almost all movement follows these rules – Anticipation, Action and Reaction. This basically means once you have grabbed the audience’s attention enough for them to gather what may happen next, the main ‘Action’ that you are trying to achieve needs to be animated, and a reaction needs to be considered afterwards. In the final reaction stage it is useful to always ask the question: what should happen in a situation like this as a consequence of this movement? And how can I animate this?
Anticipation always travels in the opposite direction in which the main action needs to occur in order to involve balance in the movement, before we travel in one direction we must first travel in another. ‘Any action is strengthened by being preceded by its opposite,’ (R. Williams, 2006 p.274,) slow anticipation = more powerful fast action and vice versa: weak anticipation = weak action. There are many examples in which to demonstrate this, for instance, a pen may rise up before writing on a piece of paper to indicate the writer’s thought process. It can be used as a tool to increase curvature and femininity in a very sexualised female character and its most popular use is it can be used in exaggerated hyperactive cartoons in something as simple as a finger point. Nowadays when it comes to animating physical combat, the frames that include the point of contact are erased so that the animation works on anticipation and reaction basis only and this proves to have a much larger impact.
The way to perfect this technique is to simply observe and research live action; life drawing can be a useful tool for this. All an animator needs to do is to understand how things move, behave and perform; performance is key to showing emotion within animation. This is why it is almost essential to plan your animation down to each detail in order to create realistic movement before you even begin animating. This is where the skill comes in as the audience; with practice, will eventually believe that it was the characters decision to make such intentional movement, and the motivation came from them. This will help towards achieving characters, which seem to have personalities and lives of their own.
There is only one disadvantage to using this technique and that is that it can become corny and boring. If the anticipation is overly obvious the audience will eventually tire of it, so the key is to mix it up a bit and do something that the audience may not expect. This can result in quite a funny or shocking piece of animation. This is actually the opposite of anticipation (“Surprise Action”) as you are leading the audience astray on purpose. However ‘Snap’ anticipation does not fall into this cheesy category and yet it is almost essential to all animations yet still very hard to achieve. It only occurs for a minute amount of frames and for this reason is almost invisible to the eye but the audience when watching it can feel it. The way it works is to add an extra spark to a speed action to make it seem more realistic, such as someone looking around in shock. The key with anticipation is to try and keep it as simple as possible and to try and show the idea behind the movement in such a way to the audience as well.