So what is animation ?
Put simply animation is a way of communicating something to someone. If you want to become good at animation you should understand this and you should understand it fully, meaning you have to know:
1. What you are communicating.
2. Who you are communicating it to.
The „what“ varies a lot. It can be a story, an idea, emotion.. whatever you choose you want your audience to see, get or feel.
The „who“, as already mentioned – your audience, will most likely be always the same – people. And I believe that when it comes to studying animation, half of the time should be devoted to studying people. What exactly do I mean by that ? I’m definitely not talking about studying the anatomy, for body is there just to carry our mind. Focus on what’s really important. What’s driving human behaviour, what makes them laugh, sad or what makes them get the jokes. As far as I know there are only 3 things that are relevant:
1. Conscious mind
2. Subconscious mind
3. Unconscious mind
To be honest you can skip the conscious mind because as much as we think we have freedom of will, we really don’t. From my research I know that for the most part conscious mind is only an observer of what subconscious mind dictates. And as explained in Layers of mind we can also skip the unconscious mind for its almost unaccessible to us.So we we are down to subconscious mind and I believe that if we are aware of that, magic will happen. More about subconscious mind.
This is my full definition of animation:
„Animation is a platform for communicating your story, ideas, thoughts and emotions to a subconscious mind of your audience„
