This month you’ll kick software jitters to the curb and dive into the core principles of animation. You’ll discover how to craft the illusion of movement, speed, weight, and personality—everything you need to make your scenes feel believable and alive.

Here’s what you’ll tackle:

– Timing & spacing made tangible : Feeling when to place keys and how far to move translates directly to believable speed and weight.

– Weight, gravity & energy transfer : A ball is a safe sandbox for testing how mass, gravity and elasticity interact—core physics you’ll reuse for every creature or prop.

– Arcs & trajectories : Clean, graceful arcs are the backbone of natural motion. The ball’s path exposes even tiny kinks.

– Graph-Editor fluency : Learning to read curve shapes—slow-in/slow-out, holds, bounces—turns the Graph Editor from a mystery panel into your best friend.

Bottom line: A bouncing-ball shot is the animation world’s “Hello, World!”—small enough to finish quickly, rich enough to teach every cornerstone principle, and perfectly paired with Maya’s core tools so you develop artistic instincts and technical muscle memory in one go.

WEEKS 5 – 8 : Squash & Stretch • Anticipation • Drag & Overlap • Vanilla Walk

This month we slip into 2D mode! (just for 1 week) You’ll unlock fresh skills and put core principles—squash-and-stretch, anticipation, drag, and overlap—through their paces with fun, hands-on drills. Each exercise packs pro-level insights so you can level up fast.

Your mission lineup:

– Squash & Stretch : Instant read on weight and volume, adds life and elasticity to even the simplest props or limbs, teaches you to conserve volume—essential for believable stylized motion.

– Successive Breaking of Joints : Turns rigid limbs into flowing, organic arcs by offsetting rotations down the chain, drills the idea that different body parts can start, stop, and reverse at slightly different times—pure appeal, Sharpens your eye for overshoot, settle, and reversals, powering up every gesture shot you’ll animate later

– Drag & Overlap: Injects believable weight by letting extremities “lag” behind the driver mass, then overshoot and settle, signals material properties (loose cloth vs. stiff armor), guides the viewer’s eye with rhythmic follow-through.

By the end of Month 2, you’ll be stretching, overlapping, breaking segments and anticipating like a pro—both on paper and in Maya!

WEEKS 9 – 12 : References • Personality Walk • Weight Shift and Direction 

For the first two weeks, you’ll be importing video refs like a mad scientist, slicing and dicing the juiciest mechanics to give your character’s walk some real swagger. Think CSI: Animation—breaking down every move so a simple ball on two legs oozes attitude.

Now we crank up the challenge: advanced locomotion takes the spotlight! You’ll animate a shot where your two-legged character shifts their weight from one leg to the other and pivots so smoothly it looks like they’re about to stroll right off the screen.

Here are the main takeaways :

– Instant silhouette appeal – Shifting hips and shoulders off axis breaks stiff symmetry and makes any idle stance look natural and engaging

– Weight-shift literacy – You learn to show which leg is carrying the load, a core skill for every motion that follows—runs, jumps, fights

– Acting through locomotion – A confident strut, a shy shuffle, or a goofy trot communicates character before dialogue or facial animation ever appear

– Real-world biomechanics – You study heel-strike, roll-through, toe-off and weight shift between legs

– Hierarchy & overlap mastery – Offsetting keys from the hips outward teaches how energy ripples through the skeletal chain for silky motion