Timeline, timing, and ease
In the last section, we understood how frames work; now, let's see how we place them in time and space so our animations gain this real feeling. I'm putting these three concepts together as I think it is hard to talk about one without the others.
Timeline
So, first of all, let's talk about the timeline, and let's focus on linear movement. Now that we have determined our two keyframes and inbetweens, let's see how to place them in time. How do we do that? We place our frames in a timeline.
A timeline is a line divided by the number of frames we want our animation to be, so here is where frame rate appears again. If we decide we want a frame rate of 25, we will have 25 frames per second drawn in our timeline, so if we have a 2-second animation, we will have 50 frames in our timeline. No worries if all these concepts sound a little bit abstract; we know that if you have never been involved in animation, it can be hard to understand...