What's the Difference Between Follow Through and Overlapping Animation?

I was having trouble with this and it was gnawing on my brain, but have no fear! Shaun from Animation Mentor is here. I read this and it helped me out alot. Thanks Shaun!

What's the Exact Difference Between Overlap and Follow-through?

This question comes from Adrien Annesley. Thanks for the great question, Adrien!

This is something that I was confused about for a long time, actually, and I used to use these terms interchangeably. However, this question really got me rethinking it, and I decided to pick the brain of some great animators at work about it to see what they thought. Kevin Martel, one of our senior animators, had some great points and set me straight on this stuff:

Follow-through is basically the "end" of the action after the main force of the action has been exerted. For example, if you slammed a sledgehammer against a wall, the rest of your body is going to continue moving for a few frames after the hammer is stopped, right? Your spine is going to go through some "successive breaking of joints" and kind of whip forward, pulling your head along with it last. The last thing that will happen in that chain of events is the head will move forward and probably rotate the chin down towards the chest. This motion would be called "follow-through."

However, if a few frames before the hammer hit, the character lifted a foot to take a step forward in order to start into a motion to reposition the body for the next hit, this movement would be called "overlapping action." It's a separate but related action that isn't necessarily being completely caused by the first action, and the timing of this action is offset, in which case it is "overlapping" the first action.

The purpose of this is to create more organic and believable actions, as well as adding entertainment to the overall complexity of the scene.

Kevin found a great quote from Walt Disney on this:
"It is not necessary for an animator to take a character to one point, complete that action completely, and then turn to the following action as if he had never given it a thought until after completing the first action. When a character knows what he is going to do he doesn't have to stop before each individual action and think to do it. He has it planned in advance in his mind."

Hope that's helpful, Adrien! Thanks for the help, Kev, and thanks also to Velislava Nikolova for the reminder! :)

Shawn :)

For more tips and tricks about animation goto his blog here. It is amazing how helpful it is.

http://www.animationtipsandtricks.com/2008/11/whats-exact-difference-between-overlap.html