Now make a copy of the character by duplicating it (
with both head and body selected), move it to the right and play with its nodes (in the Node tool) to give our man a funky dancing pose. We thus get two keyframes, and the entire animation could be as simple as alternating between them.
However, it would be much better to add intermediate frames to make the transition between the keyframes smoother. Animators call this tweening (derived from between), and Inkscape can to some extent automate this process: Select both bodies (i.e., two path objects) and do Extensions ▸ Generate from Path ▸ Interpolate. Specify the number of Interpolation steps (say, 4), select Interpolation method 1, and, if desired, use a nonzero Exponent value to make the movement speed up or slow down nonlinearly. Then, the head ellipses can be placed over the tweened bodies by another interpolation using the same number of steps and the same Exponent (Figure 20-4).
If the tweening steps don’t look right to you, you can undo the interpolation, tweak the keyframes, and reinterpolate until you get what you like. Interpolation method 1 (13.3 Path Extensions) matches the nodes that are at the same position along the path, so it is preferable when one of the keyframe paths was created by tweaking the other one without adding or removing nodes (as in our case). If two paths are of different origin and have incompatible nodes, method 2 is better.
