Animating a head turn is one of the most fundamental parts of learning to animate. It’s the perfect challenge for artists who want to perfect their character design and animation skills. Today Brent and Max show you the secrets to head turn animation the traditional way. We will use Toon Boom Harmony to traditionally animate a head turn of a character based on a design sent to us

Animation is a handmade medium that has to be redrawn 24 times a second. And characters with lots of details, are really difficult to animate. you should simplify your art as much as possible before trying to animate it.

the WRONG way to do break down drawings is to put a drawing exactly in the center of the animation. that creates a situation where you have EVEN SPACING between your drawings, and it looks very mechanical. this is an example of what not to do.

This is ideally where you would put your breakdown.

Okay were talking about spacing between the drawings, but what about TIME between the drawings. If we look at my timeline, I’ve got drawings HERE. And I can adjust how long they are on screen by just adding more held frames. So even though I only have 5 drawings, its still enough for me to get the sense of how it will look, and I can add or subtract frames until it feels right.

Now I personally like to animate on 2’s, so while I’m working, and adding drawings. I try to ensure that they all end up on odd frames. That way I won’t have parts of the animation that are one one’s, and other areas where it’s on two’s.

You don’t have to have a consistent frame rate when you’re animating. It could be a jumbled mess different frame speeds. But I personally like to keep the frame rate super consistent. Because back in the old days they didn’t really have the ability to just change frame rates at random, and I kind of wanted to preserve that consistency in my artwork.

A head turn is a simple enough traditional animation exercise, that you can do yourself. So that you can see your character come to life. So maybe try something like this, before trying to dive into animating a whole episode of something by yourself.