1. Straight ahead animation

so we're going to delve deeper into the mathematics of splines in a minute but first I want to show you around the animation department at Pixar even though we work on movies all day that in an animated movie there's no real set so our job is basically sitting in front of a computer but that doesn't mean it has to be boring since our job demands a lot of creativity we try to make Pixar feel like a place where creativity thrives the animation department is divided into different pods basically groups of offices each pod has evolved a different style this one's the jungle pod decorated with vines plants a castle and even an office made to feel like the interior of a crash-landed plane this one here is kind of a central gathering place for animators complete with the performance stage for live music I spend some of my free time as a DJ so I help decorate my pod is the vinyl lounge complete with turntables ok I'm going to start by showing you some techniques used in hand-drawn animation and then we'll see how those translate into the computer let's first animate a ball using a technique called straight-ahead animation I'm going to start with frame 1 now we'll put down another sheet of paper these pegs help us keep it lined up and I'll draw frame 2 here now frame 3 and frame 4 as you can see I'm drawing one frame after another in order when I'm done I'll scan all these pictures into the computer so we can play it back straight ahead animation works the same way in the computer you can give it a try in the next interactive demo start by dragging the ball where you want it to be at the beginning of your animation then step to the next frame and drag the ball where you want it just move it a little bit each frame keep going like this one frame at a time when you're done press play to see your animation now let's see what you can come up with