Improve Your Animations - Camera Framing and Speech Balloon Etiquette for Animation.

While this article from 2009 references the very early days of GoAnimate (now Vyond) the principles discussed about framing and speech balloons are still very relevant to anyone creating animation. Just ignore anything that specifically instructs how to use the GoAnimate Studio (which isn't much). - TET (09 March 2019)

One thing I noticed a lot of in the early months of GoAnimate's launch was that a lot of animators had good stories to tell but didn't really know how to tell them in a way that was easy to follow.

Speech balloons had so much text in them it was either too small to read and/or you didn't have enough time to read it. As well, two or more characters would have speech balloons appearing at the same time with no logical order of reading them. Not even the conventions for speech balloons in comic books were being observed.

I figured that, because GoAnimate allowed even the most inexperienced of animators to get involved, a little bit of advice in the story telling department couldn't hurt. At the very least I might get to watch a few more animations all the way through because, hopefully, my advice would inspire some improved story telling.

The first thing I tackled was those long wordy speech balloons appearing in a single scene with no change of camera shot from beginning to end. I decided to employ the use of two of GoAnimate's Classic Characters, Jay and James.

1. GoAnimate Better - The Scene

My second animation tips, this time using Match Boy and Match Girl, was even more focussed on speech balloons but this time it demonstrated proper usage and conventions. I particularly like my 'slide in, slide out' scene changes in this:

2. GoAnimate Better - Speech Balloons

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