Toolkit - Follow Through and Overlapping Action

In Nat's lesson today we worked on some more principles of animation: follow through and overlapping action. During the class we had to build on the ball we made last lesson to give it a tail/limbs, and then make those extra features move along naturally with the ball. Nat suggested doing a rabbit ball with ears that flop, or a cat with a tail. I decided to do a rabbit and wanted to make it a bit more detailed than a ball so I started with a new Flash document and sketched out a basic cartoon bunny. Here is my rough animation, where the bunny hops up and down and follows the arcs I've drawn in:

As you can see, the ears move more independently from the body, which is called overlapping action. When the rabbit stops and the ears keep moving, that's called follow through. It's generally used for things like hair and clothes on people, as after they stop moving, the hair/clothes naturally keep on going even though the person wearing them has stopped. After finishing my rough GIF, I used the rest of the lesson to neaten it up. I started with a 1920x1080 canvas but I realised I wasn't using a lot of the space, so I made it a bit smaller. Here's my finished product:

I really enjoyed this lesson, especially because it had rabbits in it! I liked recapping follow through and overlapping action, since the last time I went over the principles of animation was about a year ago! It was also nice to do a more detailed animation, building on from the skills we learnt with the bouncing balls.