Kevin Koch has an article where he talks about the difference between Secondary Action and Secondary Motion. (Click HERE to read it)

I feel that Secondary Action is something lacking from most student work.

It is not enough to have the characters delivering their lines!
Secondary Action can tell the audience a lot about who your character is.

I was reading the Spungella blog and I found a post where he is sharing an email that he wrote giving some advice on weight in animation:

About the weight. … [there's] not a trick per se to fix it, but you can pay attention to the translation specifically. Any movement that’s going up/down or sideways has to have a slow part going into something faster or vice versa.

If you have even timing and even movement it will look robotic and/or floaty.

If someone goes up, then he/she/it has to activate the muscles and fight gravity, so the up movement will be slow at the beginning, but increase over time.

Same during a down movement. The down movement of the character will start slowly and increase as it goes down since gravity comes into play.

For sideways movement think of how the character is moving and where it is going. If the character is just standing there facing you and taking a sidestep screen left for instance, then the screen right leg is doing the pushing. So those muscles have to fire up first and then the character can push off in order to move. The spacing will start close together and get wider over time.

If a character is moving fast or jumping in one direction and is then doing a direction change you have to think about how the body has to deal with the momentum.

Now, depending on the style, those ease ins/outs can happen over ten or more frames or over one or two. I’m just talking about the general idea or principle. Always be aware of the style (and to a point also the physical nature of the character (ant vs. elephant for instance).

Hope this helps!
Cheers
JD

This may sound obvious but it is good advice that we should keep in mind while animating.

Here is an excerpt of the post:

This is consistent with what most of us believe — Variety is the spice of life.  We consciously crave variety — at least we think we do.  Most of us long to visit exotic places when we’re daydreaming, but when vacation time comes, we’re usually happier to just chill out in our back yards, or travel an hour away to the beach or a favorite resort community.  The relatively new field of Happiness Research bears this out.  Research shows that more variety doesn’t make us happy, and that we’re actually happiest with what is familiar.

You can read the whole article HERE

Brendan Body has two articles on his website about acting.

• Some thoughts on acting (Subtext)
• Some thoughts on acting (Capturing Honesty)

The first heard about subtext when I was studying at Animation Mentor.
I also think that Shawn Kelly talked about subtext in his Animation Tips and Tricks a while ago.

Enjoy

I think that being one of the 12 principles of animation, Staging is one of the most overlooked.
It is a tricky and elusive concept yet really important in storytelling:

• Basic Staging Principles – Part 1
• Basic Staging Principles – Part 2

Enjoy!

I agree with most of the things that he says but I approach parts of the process in a slightly different way.
In any case it is worth checking.

Found @ Martin K´s

The new Animation Mentor Student Showcase is here!
The students keep raising the bar!
Click HERE to watch the showcase.

Also check this video where Jeffrey Engel talks about one of his shots from the showcase.