Common Mistakes in Animation

Animation in multimedia is one of the most difficult types of digital design. I, personally, have made lots of mistakes with animation design. The amount of mistakes done if you’re not the best with animation is what makes it so time-consuming. Some common mistakes can include keyframe errors, wrong exporting, working in the wrong document mode, and more.

In this blog, I am going to be talking about the three most common animation mistakes and I will elaborate on how to avoid them. Almost everyone, including myself, is guilty of having a cluttered, unorganized timeline in their animation software workspace. Sure, you can feel like you’ve done a lot just by looking at your timeline, but you absolutely will not be able to correctly identify what is what and where it's moving with a hot mess of a timeline. The number of elements and keyframes in your timeline can affect the rendering time of the animation, and also create a choppy effect in the final product. To try to avoid this problem, using fewer keyframes and editing their curves can definitely work to your advantage, especially if you are animating a lot. Another common mistakes animators make when designing animations are just blindly trying to animate something without taking inspiration or using references. There are plenty of free tools and videos on the internet that demonstrate specific animation tutorials, so I recommend that this be one of the first steps to follow along while animating. This mistake is probably the MOST common of them all, and I am guilty of it. I can say that trying to animate without any specific direction or example can come back to haunt you later on when you’ve already spent 12 hours trying to make it work and you have to trash it all because it doesn’t! If you have a dual monitor design setup, I recommend opening an inspiration animation you discovered on one screen to analyze, while designing on the other screen. This is helpful to avoid any time being wasted and ensure that your animation is well executed. It is especially helpful to do this if you are trying to make the animation look as realistic as possible. Having a lack of negative space is another very common mistake animators make. A lot of the time, we forget that the thing we're animating needs room and proximity to move. You don’t want to have everything on your canvas completely crammed together and unorganized because you won’t have much room for your subject animation to move around and be the focus. The solution to this common problem? Don’t be afraid of negative space!

If we are going to go into technical-specific mistakes such as particle effects and 3D animation, it is going to be pretty brief. On that note, some specific errors that animators make in technicalities, 3D animators tend to commonly focus on the number of animations on a model, rather than the overall quality of one animation for a model. Another thing that can hinder the quality of an animation that should be avoided is that animation may not be specific to the target audience. If you are promoting a brand, you want to put out content that correctly matches and supports that brand. I have seen plenty of “caught” errors in big animated film productions and to me, it shows off as a bit lazy to not go back and correct it.

I have a little bit of experience with animation, but not enough to teach it to someone else. Learning and researching about specific animation mistakes that not only beginner animators make, but professional animators as well have made me realize how much it actually happens and how much we can do to avoid it just by following a few steps. I hope that this has made animating in your life somewhat easier because I know I need it from time to time. Animation can take a lot of work and time, and the best possible thing you can do is make your life as easier as possible by trying to avoid any silly mistakes. With that in mind, keep animating!

Sources:

• http://www.fudgeanimation.com/experiments/common-animation-mistakes-cant-afford-make/

• http://showmetheanimation.com/features/3-mistakes-to-avoid-in-animation/

• https://www.spreadshirt.com/blog/2017/11/30/5-common-design-mistakes-to-avoid/

• https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/common-mistakes-avoid-3d-animation-design-norm-xyzcg