What is Tweening in Animation?

I love watching animated movies because the medium allows you to truly imagine anything you want and to put the camera anywhere.

This kind of creativity is contagious.

But there’s a lot of technical stuff happening in animation that I am only recently coming to understand. That includes tweening, an editing technique that I just learned about today.

It was an interesting topic and term, so I wanted to bring it here to explain it to all of you.

Let’s dive in.

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Tweening in Animation Definition

Tweening, which is short for “in-betweening,” is a technique that creates the illusion of smooth movement by generating frames that go between two keyframes. This makes the animated motion look seamless because the in-between frames fill in the gaps.

Why Tweening Matters 

Tweening is essential for creating believable animations that reflect the movement we see in real life.

The process makes characters and objects appear more lifelike via emotions and other emotive movements.

Where Did Tweening Come From? 

So, back in the day, animated projects were drawn by hand. That took a very long time, so to streamline the process, animators developed the concept of keyframes.

Keyframes were the most important poses or moments in a movement of the character or move on screen.

Assistant animators, then known as “in-betweeners,” would then fill in the remaining frames to create the illusion of fluid motion.

And now, we have tweening!

Tweening With a Computer

Now that we have computers, most animation is not hand-drawn anymore. There’s lots of good software out there, like Adobe Animate, which offers tools to generate in-between frames automatically, saving animators time and effort.

We’ve even heard of AI programs being developed to do this as well.

Computers changed the game in other ways, too. Including adding a few new categories of tweening to animation.

• Motion Tweening: This type of tweening involves moving an object from one position to another, creating the illusion of movement across the screen.
• Shape Tweening: Shape tweening transforms one shape into another, smoothly morphing the object’s form over time.
• Classic Tweening: This is the traditional hand-drawn approach, where each in-between frame is drawn manually.

Summing Up Tweening in Animation 

Now that you understand the term, it’s time to put it into practice. If you have some herky-jerky motion or your characters don’t move in realistic ways on screen, you may need to add some tweening to your keyframes to smooth things out.

If you;re an animator and have other info to add, send it to me! I’d love to make this post as accurate as possible.

Let me know what you think in the comments.