Follow-through and overlapping action

Follow-through and overlapping action is one of the 12 principles of animation: when a body stops, the loose parts of it keep going for a moment, and the parts of a body never all move at once. Hair, ears, a tail, a coat, a cape: each lags behind the part it hangs from and settles after it. Without that, a character looks stiff, as if carved from one piece of wood.

Animators used to draw every lagging part by hand. In Jabbertoon the editor does it for you: an ear, a tail, hair or a held balloon swings on a spring of its own, kicked by how its body moves and pulled back by its weight. In this short lesson you give Grump a leap and watch the follow-through happen. It takes about five minutes.

1. Open the editor

Go to jabbertoon.com/editor/. The editor opens on the Cartoon: a meadow, with nobody in it yet.

2. Bring in a character

Press Add a character on the stage. The characters you can bring in are shown.

3. Grump, ears and tail

Press Grump. Grump stands in the meadow: a dog with ears that hang and a tail.

4. What Grump can do

Press Do on Grump's bar. The moves Grump can do are on the right, in kinds.

5. Moves of the whole body

Press Move. These are the moves of the whole body: runs, jumps and hops.

6. A leap

Press Jump for joy. Grump leaps. Watch the ears and the tail as Grump lands: they keep going for a moment after the body has stopped, then settle.

7. On Grump's row

Press Put it on Grump's row. The leap goes on Grump's row of the Timeline.

8. Watch the follow-through

Press Watch. Every time Grump lands, the body stops first and the ears and the tail follow through after it, each a little later than the part it hangs from.

Try it yourself

• Overlapping action. Give Grump a run, then a stop: the ears are still flying when the feet have stopped, and the tail overlaps the body's every change of pace.
• A balloon. Pick Sunny, press Do, and in Sunny's hand choose the balloon. Walk Sunny across the meadow: the balloon trails behind on its string and catches up when Sunny stops.
• Your own. In the Forge, build a character with long ears or a long tail. Anything that hangs follows through, with no keys to set.

The springs are a way of doing what animators do by hand, and the 12 principles page shows the hand-made way too: a move whose tail swings one segment after another.