Many people seek ways and techniques to animate faster and easier, especially freelancers who want to deliver quality services while they reduce working time. If you are reading this, you are most likely among the league of doers. So, without much ado, let’s get down to the brass tacks.
Plan
Like every other creative, the importance of planning and prior evaluation of what needs to be cannot be deemphasized in animation. Planning saves you the frustration of having to repeat your designing or development processes; neither would you feel stranded after you have begun working. Putting your ideation process forward saves you a lot of stress and time; when you ideate before you begin animating, your thoughts flow freely and your development cum designing processes would follow a laid-out plan. Hold-ups are common and usual in instances where you animate directly from your mind, for each process. During planning, make notes, imagine, observe, and be conscious of timing.
Learn Quick keys
Quick keys, also known as shortcuts (keys), depend on your animator program of choice, of course. Nevertheless, these keys are life and time savers. You can check online for the quick keys of your animator. There would be loads of contents staring at you. They make your work fast and smart.
Use an Animator
A number of animator tools are available to help you to develop or select some elements or objects that can be featured in your work. For example, using SVG animation allows you to select an object, design, label, or other things that you can feature in your animation project. Animators are the real MVPs; you can select from the vast wealth of animation options, add your own modification and export it to your timeline. It saves you the time of having to create some things from scratch.
Use Software Extensions
Many of the animation programs available have extensions. They help to keep the moment of your workflow. For instance, Flash/Animate CC has its extension known as Tween2Keys and others. These extensions help when you to further the applications of a program such as doubling effect or to create a walk cycle or move something from a point to another. Extensions help to decrease manual efforts, which are usually time-consuming and can be unstable or discontinuous. Some extensions generate thumbnails for character packs at different positions and movements. You can pin those thumbnails on your timeline as new keyframes when such positions are needed to be recreated.
Reuse poses from previous works
If you really want to save a chunk of time, then you have to be smart about reusing poses, sequences, effects, and objects from previous works. Not just poses, you can copy effects and reuse them with the inclusion of a new background, design, poster, etc. You don’t have to reuse a whole sequence, just bits of it would get you ahead of the overall animation time. You speed up the modification of previous works by adding animation objects and options from SVG animator. This was Disney’s secret for many years; who says you can’t adopt it?
Image credit: Animation via Chaosamran_Studio/Shutterstock