ANIMATORS ARE A BUNCH OF FREAKING CHEATERS! >:(, and that's a great thing :D
Something I started to noticed as I'm trying to learn and improve at animation is just how much animators, from basically every medium are cheaters.
At first I always just assume that you have to play animation as straight as possible and that there are no shortcuts, only for me to learn that's a complete lie so many animators cheat in one way or another.
Smear frames is basically the holy grail for both 2d/3d animators from what I seen. Need to showcase a character going incredibly fast? Just use smear frames and boom you just showcased speed with like 2 frames of work.
Let talk more about 3d animation, since that's what I'm more familiar with and there is a lot of cheating across all levels. For example here's a bts of Luca a movie made by DISNEY!
To animate this shot we just straight up cut off half this guy face. Who knew we could solve problems by just cutting off people faces! (My lawyer advised me to say that the previous statement was a joke)
This isn't the only instance of animators cheating, Example there's this youtuber I watch called Doodley and to animate the talking he just have the mustache move to the audio waveform.
Another animation youtuber I love is Joey Carlino. He uses a lot of tools to help him in animation jiggle bones to help add secondary motion, and changing keyframes to automatic.
Hell at this point you can find any animator and they will most likely have some sort of cheat that they use to help with the animation process.
Now I note that I say cheat a lot like it's a bad thing, because usually cheat has a bad connotation. But here's the thing all of this is actually a good thing!
Animation is pretty difficult and take a long time from planning to completion having ways to decrease the time, and workload is a great way to get more ideas out in world, and share said ideas.
I guess this blog can help serve as a reminder that I shouldn't keep worrying about doing things properly every artist/animator have their own methods and shortcuts they take.