Hold or Not Hold?

I remember what Tom told me a few months ago, he told me I need to make more “Transition Pose”. To tell the truth, I was like…yeah…umm…maybe, I understand.

But I guess we need to apply to something practical to understand correctly, and I just run into the situation that required me to face some similar stuff yesterday. Basically, as far I as know, most of the animation teacher told us to make “HOLD”, pose, hold pose, hold…something like that.

Yes, I guess this method really works well especially when we animate in pose-to-pose, but the thing for me is sometimes this ends up with very solid, not fluid movement. Of course, as I had drawn intestinally, hold should not be just “Hold” but needs to be added some more ease-in and out, spacing stuff. Even though, sometimes still looks solid.

Yesterday I was working on my animation test and, dealt with my timing really carefully (since the main focus right is timing and spacing for me), I didn’t know why but I could not get the timing I wanted. So what I did was DELETE some pose of the end of the hold. This is how it looked.

This is not something new actually; this is just all about,

We don’t have to hold so long every time!!

But I didn’t notice that this really helped me change and add variety of timing in animation (in this illustration, those poses might look more breakdown but I guess it’ OK as long as it works).

I guess now I understand what Tom meant at that time.