Position Of Attack Tutorial here brought to you by Terkoiz.

Positioning Tutorial here brought to you by Terkoiz. If you're quite new to animation itself, you might not comprehend some terms being used.

•What exactly is Position and Attack?

FIRST OF ALL, this is a fairly confusing and complicated tutorial if you are new to animation and some basic anatomy

Position means : "bodily posture or attitude: to be in a sitting position." - Dictionary.com
Pretty self explanatory right?

Attack means : "to set upon in a forceful, violent, hostile, or aggressive way, with or without a weapon; begin fighting with: He attacked him with his bare hands." - Dictionary.com
Pretty self explanatory once again.


With that in mind, let's mesh that together with what you (hopefully) know. Let's bring in

Mr. Stick and Mr. Red. Oh hey! They're already on it. Let's get this tutorial started before they kill each other.
(Keep in mind, this is my style of animating so what ever style you animate with, results may vary between styles)

bull;Position and Attack Concept
Some animators use this kind of technique to do some fancy shmancy combos. The only person (that I know of) that uses this type of technique is Cicada. There are other ways but I favor this one because of it's flexibility.
(Reminder: This is my style of animating. If yours doesn't exactly look like mine, that's perfectly fine. In fact, that is encouraged.)


Positioning

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These are just some postures that I've gotten use to over my years of animating. There are actually countless of ways to position your stick. I'm just taking out the more major ones that suit this tutorial. If this is too much to handle for you, take a look at the Attacking section


Attacking

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Red arrows point out how many possibilities this limb could attack with. To be honest, these are just really REALLY basic attacks. Though it may look complicated (and a bit intimidating) it's really not that big of a deal. If you look at it this way, One stick could have ENDLESS positions and one position could have ENDLESS possibilities.
∞ + ∞ = ?
Do the math

 

>
First of all, I'm sure you know how to position your stick. Just draw him in a stance. Now when you got your guy all set up, we're going to hurt Mr. Red. But how do you know which attack to do? This is probably the easiest task mentally for an animator. First of all you need to know how things work with each other.
•Limbs
•Position
•Attack
•Reaction

Limbs
First of all, you know you have 4 limbs right? Left arm, right arm, right leg, and left leg. Let's not add 2 more arms. That'd make it a bit more complicated.

To make it a bit more realistic, make sure that you animate your joint human like. (or you could do no joints at all which would be pretty fine. You're gonna need to find another tutorial for that tho )
•Shoulders - Hard to imagine sticks having shoulders but just remove the broad shoulders. just image a join inside your rib (which is pretty gross. lol)
•Elbows - Easiest concept. 180degrees - 20ish degrees joint movement
•Hands (optional) - Pretty maneuverable. Just look at your hand when you're animating hands.
•Fingers (optional) - Same thing as hands, just look at them.
•Hips - The join that connects the leg to the torso.
•Knee - Pretty much the same thing as elbows 180-20 degree joint movement.
•Ankle - Look at it. I don't know how to explain it It has limited movement out of the rest.
•Toes (very unlikely but okay.) uh. To be honest I won't know how to explain this. I have never seen toes on a stick figure.

Position
If you know how to stand then you know how to draw a stick standing. Positioning is dependent towards the animator's liking. If you watch those kung fu movies you'll know what I'm talking about.

Attack

Out of the possibilities I could chose, I think I'm gonna punch Mr. Red right in the face. Let's see how that goes. That's just one attack though. Try and come up with a combolicious attack

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This is just an example on how it can be used to combine some attacks


Reaction
People sometimes miss this part completely. This is probably the key component of continuing a barrage of attacks on the object being hit.

Good Example:

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Notice how Mr. Red keeps on his feet all this tie until the last hit.

Bad Example:

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Mr. Red just falls to the ground. The only reaction was falling and nothing else. Mr. Stick doesn't have anywhere to put another punch in him.


•Ending comments
Once again, all these moves you've seen were my style. You can create own original style. This tutorial is just showing you guys one technique of doing fight scenes and such. You can create awesome kickass moves. There are literally infinite possibilities towards what you can do with 2d fight moves. It's just resting upon your mind.

Probably most important element: Experimentation and WATCHING ACTION MOVIES.

Well, That's all my wisdom can poop out. Peace

-Terkoiz