The Teachers' Animation Toolkit

95
WORKSHEET: DRAWING KEY FRAMES AND INBETWEENS
Teachers’ note:
This is an excellent exercise for students of drawn animation. Invite 
one student to perform a sequence of movements in front of the 
group, for example, sitting down, bowling, karate or ballet. Get the 
performer to freeze the action at the start, middle and end.
Ask the class to draw the three key frames of the movement 
performed.
If students lack confi dence in their drawing skills, encourage them 
to work in stick man style. This can help them to focus on analysing 
movement, rather than drawing technique.
Actions:
Kicking a football
Walking
Picking up a cup and drinking from it
Hammering a nail
Putting on a hat
Being frightened by a ghost
A cowboy with a lasso trying to catch cattle
A dog scratching his ear
Invite the performers to think up different actions. If they are more 
complex, up to six key frames may be needed. The class might wish 
to develop their favourite movements into short animated cycles by 
fi lling in the inbetweens.
Materials:
Thin white A4 paper or tracing paper, soft pencils, hole punch, ring 
binders, 2D animation rostrum, lights, lightbox if available
Resources:
Handouts:
 
Hand-Drawn Animation Standard or 
Widescreen: 
Video clips: see previous worksheet.

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96
The Teachers’ Animation Toolkit
WORKSHEET: LIP SYNC
Teachers’ note:
Making a speaking character’s lip movements syncronize with their 
speech track is an advanced technique and a full description of the 
methods used in the industry is beyond the scope of this toolkit. 
However, this exercise is a simple and fun way to help students with 
their drawing and observation skills. Some may fi nd they need to 
use lip sync in more advanced projects at a later stage. If so, Toon 
Boom Studio, the drawn animation software package, has a system 
for matching key framed mouth shapes to a dialogue audio track.