Your first ten minutes on the Anima timeline
Layers, keyframes, frames, onion skinning and a playhead you can scrub: a gentle first look at the timeline in Anima by Zaweba for anyone new to animation.
If you've ever used a timeline-and-stage animation program, you'll feel at home in Anima by Zaweba within a minute. If you haven't, don't worry. The timeline is laid out the way most animators expect, and it only has a few ideas to learn. Once they click, everything else in the app builds on them.
Here's what I'd show a friend sitting down with Anima for the first time.
Frames, left to right
Across the top of the timeline is a row of numbered frames. An animation is a sequence of still pictures shown quickly one after another, and each frame is one of those pictures. Time runs from left to right. The further right a frame is, the later it appears.
The playhead is the marker that shows which frame you're looking at. Drag it along and the stage shows each frame in turn. That's scrubbing, and you'll do it constantly, to check timing, to find a moment, or just to see how a movement feels at different speeds.
Layers, top to bottom
Down the left side are the layers. They work like sheets of clear film stacked on top of each other. Whatever is on a higher layer is drawn in front of whatever is below. Put the background on the bottom layer, a character on the layer above and a foreground bush on top, and the character walks behind the bush without you having to do anything clever.
Keeping separate things on separate layers is the single best habit to start with. It means you can animate the character without disturbing the background, and hide or lock layers you're not working on.
Keyframes and plain frames
This is the idea that matters most. A keyframe is a frame where something changes: you've drawn something new, or moved something to a new position. A plain frame simply holds whatever the last keyframe showed.
So to make a ball sit still for a second, you draw it on a keyframe and extend plain frames after it. To make it move, you add another keyframe later with the ball somewhere else. Anima can then fill in the movement between the two, which is what tweens are for, and the subject of another article.
On the timeline, keyframes and plain frames look different, so you can see at a glance where the changes happen in each layer. After a while you read a timeline like a piece of music, spotting the busy passages and the quiet ones.
Drawing on the stage
For now, Anima's animations are drawn with vector shapes, using the pen, pencil and shape tools on the stage. Text, sound and imported pictures are coming in later versions. Vector shapes stay crisp at any size, which suits the web, where your animation may be shown on a small phone or a large monitor.
Onion skinning
Onion skinning shows faint copies of the frames before and after the one you're on, as if you were looking through thin paper at the drawings underneath. It's how animators judge spacing. If you're drawing a ball bouncing frame by frame, onion skin lets you see where it was and where it's going, so each new position sits in the right place.
Turn it on whenever you draw movement by hand. Turn it off when it gets cluttered. It's one of the oldest tricks in animation and still one of the most useful.
Try a bouncing ball
The classic first exercise is a bouncing ball. Draw a circle near the top of the stage on frame one. Add a keyframe a little later with the ball at the bottom, and another later still with it back at the top. Scrub the playhead and watch it move. Then try Test Movie with Ctrl+Enter to see it play at full speed.
It won't look perfect yet, because real bounces ease in and out, but you'll have used every part of the timeline. Anima runs offline on Windows with no account, so you can spend as long as you like getting that bounce right.
