# Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Basic Animation

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### Frames and Keyframes

A  is a snapshot of the scene at
one moment in time. An animation consists of displaying a succession of
frames representing successive moments in time; if these are shown
sufficiently quickly (at least 24 frames per second), the eye is fooled
into seeing smooth movement, instead of a succession of still poses.

This is the principle behind both cinema film and digital video. But
long before these were invented, it was known that you could make a
sequence of drawings on pages of a *flipbook*, which could then be
rapidly flipped by hand to produce an animation.

In live action video, we can capture the frames simply by letting the
camera record as the scene unfolds. In hand-drawn animation (cartoons),
each frame had to be drawn by a human animator (though there were some
shortcut techniques like articulated character pieces, separately-moving
scenery layers etc). Actually what would happen was that the most
skilled artists would create
s representing pivotal points
in the animation (starting and ending poses in a character's movement
etc), and the lower-paid assistants would have the job of filling in all
the intermediate frames to produce smooth movement between those
endpoints.

Computer animation works in a similar way, except here Blender is your
lower-paid assistant. You go to crucial points in the timeline of your
animation, position and pose your objects/characters appropriately, and
tell Blender that this is a keyframe for the relevant transformations
(positioning/rotation/scaling) of those objects/characters. Then when
you run the animation, Blender will *interpolate* the specified
transformation parameters between keyframes, giving you smooth motion
over those intervals.

## The Timeline

At the bottom of the default Blender screen layout is a window called
the 
![](Blender270TimelineIcon.png "Blender270TimelineIcon.png"). This gives
you an overview of your animation.

![](Blender263Timeline.png "Blender263Timeline.png"){width="800"}

You can zoom the view in and out with the mouse wheel, or scroll left
and right with .

The numbers across the bottom are frame numbers, with your animation
starting at frame 1. The light grey background indicates the total
duration of the animation. The vertical green line is positioned at the
current frame time, and the current frame number is also displayed in
the box between the start/end values and the transport controls, and at
the lower left of the viewport in the 3D view window. Yellow lines
indicate where keyframes have been inserted.

You can set the current frame time by clicking with
 at the desired position. You can hop
forward and backward a frame at a time with the left- and right-arrow
keys, skip to the next or previous keyframe with the up- or down-arrow
keys, and jump immediately to the first or last frame by holding down
 and pressing left- or right-arrow.

You can also "scrub" by dragging with 
across the timeline, which causes the animation to run backwards or
forwards at whatever speed you choose, locked to the times across which
you drag.

## See Also

-   The animation
    section
    in the Blender user manual.

