Every principle in the first series was discovered by someone looking at the real world. For Bambi, the Disney studio brought live deer inside so the animators could draw them. Animators still film themselves acting a scene before they animate it. The best references for motion are rarely in other people's motion. They are outside.
Here is a short field guide. Everything on it is something you can see this week, with the principle hiding inside.
A field guide
- A flock of birds turning together is stagger: each bird reacts to its neighbor a fraction later, and that is why it reads as a wave.
- A falling leaf never goes straight down. It drifts, swings in arcs and slows at the top of every swing: arcs, easing and secondary action in two seconds.
- The view from a train window is parallax. The fence races, the trees pass, the mountains barely move. Depth, told with speed alone.
- A coin spinning on a table is settle. It wobbles lower and faster until it rests, and the last wobble is the one you remember.
- An elevator is easing you feel in your stomach. It speeds up, cruises and slows down before the door opens. A linear elevator would be terrifying.
- A crowd crossing the street is overlap. Nobody starts on the same frame, nobody walks at the same speed, and still it reads as one movement.
- A stone in still water is timing and spacing. The first ring is fast and tight, the next ones slower and further apart.
- Pages in the wind are follow through. The spine of the book stops, the pages keep going.
The ten second exercise
Record ten seconds of something moving with your phone. Anything: a curtain, a queue, a dog shaking off water. Then play it frame by frame. Count how many frames the fastest part takes and find where it slows down. Write down one thing you did not expect. Do it every day for a week and you will have seven references nobody else has.
It is also a cure for the blank screen. When nothing comes, do not look for ideas in feeds of finished work: they only show answers. Go and find a question instead. Something real that moves, and how it would move if it were a card, a title or a logo.
Constraints help
Another way out of a creative block is to make the problem smaller. One color. Three elements. Five seconds. A single movement, repeated. Constraints force decisions, and decisions are exactly what an empty project is missing. Some of the most memorable openings are one idea, done with care.
So, this week, look up from the screen. Something around you is moving better than anything on your timeline.