Principles of Motion

“I’m not interested in how people move, but what moves them.”

— Pina Bausch

Where to begin? Why not look to the THEATRE!?

When starting to think about motion design, it can be helpful to look towards the world of the theatre and dance where much movement analysis and theory originated. Rudolf Laban, a dance artist and theorist, developed a system for analyzing and categorizing human movement called Laban Movement Analysis (LMA).

He began by examining four basic categories, commonly reffered to as the BESS System:

The Efforts of Motion

Leban went on to further breakout his system by developing four pairs of components that describe the effort of a movement:

These four pairs were then used to create clear descriptive actions called THE EIGHT EFFORTS:

BUT I DON’T WANT TO BE A DANCER / ACTOR / PERFORMER!
I BUILD WEBSITES! HOW IS THIS USEFUL???

These eight efforts are a great starting point for talking about motion design with a client or team. They provide a common language to describe the quality and feel of motion, which can be incredibly useful when trying to communicate ideas and concepts. Here’s some examples of these efforts used to describe various kinds of websites: