Straight Ahead and Pose to Pose

These are the two different ways in which animator’s work, whilst being the reason that some animation processes are limited in the way that they work. For instance stop motion can only ever work in straight ahead animation. This basically means that their work has to be made frame by frame by frame, in chronological order. Different from pose to pose animation, which is what CGI, tends to work in. Pose to pose is where the animator works on the main key frames (the place at which an action is about to change or has changed,) first and then they add all the frames in-between later.
Both forms are still used today and are sometimes combined with each other to make sure that straight ahead animating doesn’t lose its rag. There may need to be some guidance as to maintaining mass, positions, personality and interaction with other characters and props within the scene. It is the key to getting this balance between the two styles that will allow you to achieve the quirky surprises, unexpected timings and smooth flow of an animated piece. 2D animators tend to have the advantage of having to choice to be able to work in either way, but usually it depends on the animator, as they both have their advantages and disadvantages.

Straight Ahead
Advantages – it can add more personality and liveliness to an animation, as it is a far more relaxed technique compared to the over structured approach that pose to pose can prelude. It usually tends to have a classically fresh wacky feel to it for it can be quite spontaneous.
Disadvantages – corrections cannot be as easily made, and a large amount of concentration is necessary to avoid such mistakes. Some of the most common and hard to avoid mistakes is sometimes the timings can be a little off, as this animation style can be difficult to hit key frames dead on, due to being unable to plan in any way near as much detail. This is why stop-motion artists tend to capture far more frames than needed as it is always better to subtract then add. You also have to look out for your animated figure gaining and loosing invisible inertia. Animators can get away with this if it is just a small amount of frames that this happens to instead of a whole selection and the movement is very slight, as otherwise the audience will pick up on it.

Pose to Pose
Advantages – Regarded as the more commercial way to animate, as it can be much faster and far less time wasting. Once the key frames are drawn up by a singular animator other animators can then step in and take over drawing the in-between frames, instead of relying on one singular animator to do the whole action. It is much easier to get the timings and sizes right, easier to synchronise other actions that may be happening on the screen (this makes dialogue a lot easier to animate.) It also means that the animator can carefully consider all of the principles in each of the key frames before passing it on, as more time can be spent on improving them and therefore that makes this style of animating a lot easier to follow.
Disadvantages – unfortunately even though you can plan and structure your animation far more easily, if you go too far with the planning your animation can seem pretty stiff and too organised at times. This will make it look structured and unnatural, therefore eventually boring your audience with its predictability, especially if there are a lot of individual elements to animate, as they won’t synchronise with anything else on screen.