Build Better Brand Awareness with Animation
Written By: Shane Clark on November 7, 2021
The year 2020 served as a crucible for companies to rethink how they establish and convey their identities. The epidemic, tense national politics, and racial reckoning influenced the public’s attention. These were just a few of the pivotal events in politics and culture occurring then. The storytelling that brands used mirrored this new mentality.
Brand purpose can no longer be dismissed as an afterthought. It’s not a flimsy remark slapped upon an ad or a logo. Instead, consumers want to know what marketers stand for, and storytelling is the best way to convey a brand’s values and voice.
It can be challenging to get started learning animation if you’ve never done it before. To make a successful animation, many things have to come together, from illustration talents to generating realistic movement to learning how to use animation tools.
Suppose you want to use animation to raise brand awareness. In that case, you have to be aware of the foundational principles of animation – and use them to make videos that will differentiate your business from the rest of your competition.
Building Better Animation
1. Avoid Stiff Movements by Squashing and Stretching
The illusion of elasticity and liveliness can be created by squashing and stretching objects as they move in the animation. It can also notify the viewer about the object’s hardness or softness (softer elements or objects should naturally squash and stretch more). If your animations appear overly rigid, consider using this principle to see if it helps make things more natural.
2. Make It Possible for Your Audience to Anticipate Movements
It’s rare for an object to start going forward without some form of preceding movement in the opposing direction. For example, consider the act of tossing a ball. Before extending an arm, a person will unconsciously pull back his or her throwing arm first. The addition of anticipation gives the spectator a sense of what’s to come and prevents your movement from seeming random.
3. Ensure the Follow Through
Anticipation is all about how you begin your movement. Follow-through is how a character or object onscreen completes the movement. When an object comes to a complete stop, it usually doesn’t do so abruptly. There will always be minor movements after the main action has ended. These little movements will give it a more realistic appearance.
4. Create Natural-Looking Movements with Arcs
Almost nothing in nature goes in a straight line—waving your hand or moving your arm will reveal an arc, even if it’s a small one. If your animations are looking a little weird, consider using some arcs to smooth the route of the movement.
5. Remember to Ease into Movements
When an item moves, it doesn’t always start moving at the quickest pace or stay at the same speed the entire time, but a lot of terrible animation does. As a result, you should ensure that your movements have a natural acceleration and deceleration, as per the principle of slow in and slow out. You may apply this to your animations by including more frames at the start of a particular movement, a few in the middle, and more at the finishing point.
6. Create Intentional Timing with Your Frames
Pay particular attention to the principle of time if you’re wondering how to animate smoothly. The number of frames your action takes and how close those frames are arranged together are also factors in timing. You may change an animation’s smoothness, weight, and perceived speed by changing the number of frames. To make an animation appear more fascinating and lifelike, you should use a variety of timing methods.
7. Utilize Secondary Actions
Secondary actions aren’t necessary for a scene to function, but these do support the main movement and provide depth. Try adding some supplementary action to your animations if you feel that the scene is dropping flat.
8. Don’t Be Afraid to Move Around a Lot
While much of modern animation is about creating believable or lifelike movements, exaggeration is what frequently makes a good animation fantastic. The viewer may ignore too subtle actions, so consider pushing the animation beyond the limitations of natural movement, especially when you want to add drama or highlight something.
9. Use Visual Highlighting to Draw Attention to the Important Elements
Staging is done to draw the viewer’s attention to the most significant aspects of a scene. Add minor motions or other visual accents to draw the viewer’s eye if you’re having trouble deciding what to focus on in your animation.
10. Select the Most Appropriate Animation Strategy for Your Scenario
There are two methods for animating: straight ahead, where the animation begins at the very beginning, and you have to work your way to the conclusion; and pose to pose, where the animation starts at the end of the movement, and you then have work carefully to the middle.
11. Double-Check That Your Drawings Are Spatially Accurate
One of the most crucial 2D animation strategies is solid drawings. Solid drawings remind us that even if you’re representing an object in two dimensions, you must still make it appear as if the thing exists in three dimensions. It would be a good idea to practice your 3D drawing skills and ensure that all the components in your animation have realistic balance, weight, and volume.
12. Evaluate If Your Animation Is Appealing
You can get caught up in the technical aspects of animation when you first start, which is why the last principle is here: make your work engaging for the viewer by making it fun and by adding variety and beauty to the entirety of the animation.
Summary:
Animation can be incredibly complex – but it’s worth the investment because it improves brand recall while allowing any business to utilize any narrative for marketing. In addition, animation is unfettered, and you can splash animation on your site and social channels to engage your customers more. Should you need professional animation, be sure to email Shane today.
