Welcome to lesson 1 of Animated Loops.
I’m James Curran, an animator, director, and illustrator.
If you know me, you might know me from making gifs.
I’ve made a lot of them, hundreds if not thousands.
I’m going to share with you some of my favorite techniques
that I’ve learned over the years to help you make looping animations
that people will want to watch again and again and again forever.
In this first lesson, we’re just going to go through some basic fundamental tips
for making great loops,
which we’ll use in the second part of this lesson to create a very simple loop.
We’ll be using After Effects which has been my main tool
for designing and animating many of the loops I’ve made.
Let’s get started with our first loop tip.
#1 Keep it short.
I always say that you should be able to describe a loop in one sentence.
For example, it’s a man walking a dog;
or it’s a dog eating an ice cream; or it’s an ice cream riding a skateboard.
Something like that.
If you have to describe it by saying this happens, and then this happens,
and then this happens,
then you aren’t making a loop, you’re making a short film.
Focus on one action which repeats forever.
That means the animation can potentially be very simple.
But even with a very simple animation,
you should do everything you can
to make it as interesting as possible to look at.
Loop tip 2: animate everything.
By this I mean that if there’s anything in your scene which can move,
then move it.
If you have a character walking,
you obviously need to animate the arms and legs,
but you should also animate their hair, fingers, clothes, shoe laces,
anything you can do to add some secondary motion.
You should also think about the different ways
that each individual element can move with position, rotation, and scale,
but also with changing a shape such as making the hair wave
or adding depth to the movement by having objects appeared to turn in 3D.
The more movement you have in your scene
(even just having one element moving in several different ways at once),
the more opportunity there is to play with the timing of these movements
to create overlaps in the animation.
Overlapping is a great way to make even a very short loop
feel longer and more complex.
It’s also a great way to keep momentum going in the animation
by using the overlaps to avoid any pauses in the motion.
#3 Keep it moving.
Always try to have something moving in your animation.
If the action ever comes to a complete stop,
and everything stays frozen - even just for a couple of frames
- then you lose the momentum you need to make a loop feel continuous.
When your characters are repeating actions such as jumping or throwing,
you should try to blend seamlessly from the action ending
into the beginning of the action repeating.
If you have something moving back and forth like a pendulum,
then it obviously needs to stop before it turns around.
And sometimes there might not be an opportunity
to add much overlapping animation to hide the pause.
But as long as you carefully ease in and out at the change of direction,
so the momentum isn’t lost, then it shouldn’t feel like it ever stops at all.
Loop tip 4: make it smooth.
Making the animation very smooth is a big part of making loops,
as you want the animation to feel very fluid and almost hypnotic.
This mainly comes down to making sure that your motion paths
follow very smooth curves,
as any jagged movement or sudden jumps will be very noticeable,
breaking the flow of the motion.
You really need to be a perfectionist when making loops.
When you’re animating a shot as part of a longer film, there’s a certain amount
you can get away with when being a little bit rough with your animation.
As people are usually only going to see each frame fly by once.
With loops, people are going to see each frame tens or hundreds of times.
So, you really need to make sure that each one is perfect.
Even slight imperfections can be very noticeable.
And the final tip #5 is find your rhythm.
Timing is probably the most important thing in all animation
regardless of the formats, and loops are no different.
I think it’s helpful to think of loops as a visual piece of music,
which you can break down into equally spaced visual beats.
That doesn’t mean that every note in your loop has to hit on every beat, though.
Just like they don’t in a piece of music.
For example, you can have a loop which takes 3-4 seconds to repeat.
Within that, you can have a character’s walk cycle
which takes 1.5 seconds to repeat,
so that repeats twice within the full loop.
It could be walking a dog who needs to walk a bit faster to keep up.
So, the dog has a walk cycle that takes 1 second to repeat.
That repeats 3 times within the full loop.
Maybe the character is bouncing a ball every 0.5 second,
so the ball bounces 6 times within the full loop.
You get the idea.
You should also think about the timing
of each of these individual loops within the loop.
Sometimes if the loop points all meet at the same time,
then the animation can feel a little bit robotic because everything is too in sync.
Maybe you have a loop with four characters running together,
but their run cycles are all totally in sync.
It can look a little bit unnatural.
Instead, you should offset each of these individual loops
and space them apart with equal timing
so that it creates a constant flow of each animation leading into the next.
I usually animate at 24 frames per second
because it’s easy to divide into lots of different length loops.
If you’re making a 3-second loop, for example,
you don’t need to create loops that are whole seconds.
But when you get into creating more complicated animations,
having a simple system to keep your loops organized is very helpful.
30 frames per second is OK too,
but there are less potential loop lengths with an even number of frames.
So, it makes it a bit more difficult to space actions out equally.
I’ve found that spacing the timing of actions out equally
is a great way to make the loop feel rhythmic and more hypnotic.
But you should try to make the rhythm fit with whatever is you’re animating.
Don’t have a character bouncing so obviously to a beat
that it takes away from the focus of what people are supposed to be looking at.
You should find the rhythm that naturally fits with whatever the key action is
because the story always comes first.
In summary, a good loop is short, detailed, always moving,
with smooth rhythmic animation.
All of these tips are connected to one thing,
which is the most important rule of all in animated loops:
hiding where the loop point is.
If people can see where the loop ends,
then they consciously know that the animation has finished.
So, they’ll stop watching.
You want to try to make sure that never happens.
Now we’ll start using these tips to create a very simple loop
in the next part of this lesson.
See you there!
Thanks for watching!