You can practice and utilize any animation principle in AS. Some, like FBF, may require you to be more creative with your chosen tool, but no tool can really limit a determined artist. And while you may feel that you have plenty of time to learn the basics, AS will save you tons of time once you start animating actual projects.Mistro wrote:My goal right now is to follow some fundamentals I'm learning from "The Animator's Survival Kit". I know I can practice some of the basics in ASP but it's the little things that make the magic happen that I want to have access to doing in an animation program like articulate the swing of pant legs with all the folds and shadows, complex expressions and timing, I want to make good use of my Wacom Intuos Pro as I practice drawing key and inbetween drawings etc. Since I'm not in a studio with time constraints, I just want to have fun with this now while I can and I think it will benefit me in the long run since I'm new at this to do the basics from the start. Basically I want the option to have full control over what's drawn in the frames in a manual way when the time calls for it. I'm a big fan of the oldschool animation styles I grew up watching and that's the foundation I want to start from. ASP seems to skip some of those things simply by not having official fbf support out the box.
Depending on what you grew up watching, it may have been more "limited animation" (like Hanna-Barbera) than traditional frame-by-frame (like Disney). Aside from the time-saving strategies of the former, both rely on all the same principles, like anticipation, secondary motion, exaggeration, etc.