From the Museum of Modern Art, here’s a delightful guide to creating hand-drawn animation brought to you by Kohana Wilson. His explanation of how persistence of vision works is easy to understand and essential to perceiving animation. Here is the description from the YouTube page:
Learn how to make hand-drawn animations from start to finish. In this tutorial, animator Kohana Wilson (they) walks through the tools, techniques, and principles behind classic paper animation, from the first drawn frame to a finished animated sequence in After Effects. Whether you’re animating an abstract dot, a dragonfly, or a tumbling character, this video breaks down the entire traditional animation workflow, from preliminary sketches to a polished, moving sequence.
You will learn:
- The Science Behind Animation: Persistence of Vision Explained with a Zoetrope, Praxinoscope, and Flip Book
- Essential tools: light boxes, peg bars, and paper options for hand-drawn animations.
- Direct animation: draw frame by frame in sequence
- Keyframe and Intercut Animation: Plan the key poses first, then complete the movement.
- Animation Basics: Squish and Stretch, Slow In and Out, Tracking, Overlapping Action, and Diffuse Frames.
- How to Clean Preliminary Animations and Scan Their Frames for Digital Editing
- How to bring your sequence to life in Adobe After Effects
Artwork references included: Lotte Reiniger, John Canemaker, Winsor McCay, David Ehrlich, Eadweard J. Muybridge, Mary Beams, Maria Lassnig, and William Kentridge.