Animation Questions

1. What is ease-in and ease-out in reference to animation?

Ease in and ease out basically describes the speed of the object when they are travelling between two extremes/poses.

If the object travels at the same speed throughout, it will make the animation look boring, and in some cases, will make it look unnatural and lack of gravity. However, with easing-in and easing-out, the object would first move from point A very slowly out, before accelerating to normal speed. When it is about to reach point B, it will start to slow down and eventually stop at point B. Thus the speed is no longer constant, which makes its movement more interesting to watch.

2. What does frames-per-second means?

Frame is a unit in animation. One frame consists of one image. Frames per second (or fps) simply means that number of images that are shown within a second. It works exactly the same as flip books. The number of pages flipped per second would be the same as frames per second.

Our default fps for films is usually 24 fps, which means that within one second, the films will be transitioning between 24 pictures. Our eyes cannot see the transition taking place around this rate, so this rate is good for us to do animations.

3. The spacing of the ticks in the animation chart below is for an object bouncing with linear speed over 12 frames – draw a similar chart, but with ease-in and ease-out.