LIMITED ANIMATION DOES NOT MAKE YOU A LOUSY ANIMATOR!
Using fewer frames makes your animation expressive, playful and free.
Limited animation is a beautiful and masterful art. This is often overlooked by the ‘cheap’ reputation of the technique.
Because of the use of fewer frames or movement, limited animation is mostly used as a budgetary alternative to full animation. While animating, you might feel like you are a lazy animator. Not striving for the best and taking the easy way out.
The animation could also feel limiting. You don’t have enough frames to make what you want, so your animation feels slow, stiff and cheap.
This is why limited animation should not be seen as a direct substitute for full animation. You simply don’t have the means to make fluid animation and reach the same animation standards.
When you start treating limited animation as a separate animation form, instead of a watered down version of full animation, you can find the beauty and strength in the limitations.
The use of fewer frames allows you to show animation in a very transparent form. Every frame that is made becomes more important and more visible. Your drawings or images are freed from the sea of indistinguishable inbetweens. The viewer is now able to see the mechanics and tricks behind the ‘illusion’ of animation.
The fact that animation is just a series of images is not so easy to cover up anymore. So why try hiding this? Start using it to its advantage!
Now that you don’t have to fool the viewer with the ‘illusion of life’, you are also free to stylize movement. There is no need for fully lifelike motion anymore. You are allowed to play with motion, to leave things out, forgo the laws of our world.
Stop treating limited animation as a boring necessity and start seeing it as a playground for expression.
The feeling, energy and essence of a movement should be your guide when animating.
By deliberately choosing what moves, when it moves and in what order everything moves, you can direct the focus of the viewer to specific parts of an animation. The less movement there is, the more notable a movement is!
You are free to play around with the position, duration and timing of your frames. When you do this, limited animation can become freeing and fun!
Don’t be afraid to leave things out. Not every movement has to be fully explained.
Don’t be afraid to reuse frames. Repeat movement, scale your frames, rotate your image.
Don’t be afraid to keep things still. Not everything has to move at once.
Don’t be afraid to play around with framerates. You don’t have to stick to just 1 framerate.