I mentioned in the comments previously that Sinbad - Sailor of the Seven Seas might be my least favorite film among those I worked on. I’ve always been pretty good at separating the work from the product — I loved working on Sinbad, and the production was a great experience. I’d been promoted, I was assisting amazing animators (James Baxter and Jakob Jensen), I was getting scenes of my own, the directors and production staff were cool, I was hanging with a great posse of junior animators, the food was free and tasty, life was good all around. But the film? Not so much.
Today let’s step away from the technical aspects of character animation, and focus on the forest and not the trees. Try taking a completely non-technical approach in the early stages of your shots. I’m recommending you get yourself firmly into right-brain mode, block out your internal critic, and just animate from the gut. Animate unconsciously. Put yourself into a trance. Try not to let anything or anyone interrupt you during this phase. Work this way until the shot starts to take clear shape. Then, and only then, start consciously thinking about the principles of animation. Only then start consciously monitoring your poses and arcs and spacing. But as you go into a conscious, thinking mode, don’t lose the initial spontaneity and verve of your first pass.
That’s the question I was asked by a recently graduated animation student I spoke to at last year’s SIGGRAPH FJORG! event. One of the things I spoke about then was the need to treat the body as a connected whole — when the head moves, for example, the chest and shoulders are going to move, too. Without this nuanced connectedness, almost any movement looks unnatural. This student took that to heart, and since then wrote:
My eye for detail has really improved (still has a long way to go, of course) but now I face another problem: time. Adding in all these subtle details takes time, and sometimes I’ll spend a few hours adding something in and when I playblast, I can barely notice it.
Anyone out there who’s curious about how the Animation Mentor ‘eCritiques‘ work, I just did one for the May winner over at the 11 Second Club. Brazilian Ivan Oviedo did a great, hilarious hand-drawn scene to win the closest 11 Second Club competition ever. I got a little carried away, and did about three sessions worth of eCritiques in one session, so be warned that it’s pretty long! You can go directly to the critique here.
I have to admit I went a little crazy with this, but it was like a science experiment. I wanted to see if this apparent rule (that moving or facing right always means good, and moving/facing left indicates evil) really held up. I’ve taken a screen shot of almost every scene in the film and put them in sequence in five montages. There are shots I left out if there were repeats of previous camera set-ups or if they were quick connecting shots. The montages read left to right, top to bottom. Click on the montage to enlarge. On my 15″ screen the captions are barely readable - hopefully you can make them out okay.
Back when I was writing up the posts on Shot Flow (here and here) in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, I watched Bad Day at Black Rock on Turner Classic Movies. I was in the mode of analyzing how shots hooked up, and I noticed something kind of amazing. Director John Sturges and cinematographer William Mellor (and an uncredited storyboard artist?) used screen direction to define character polarity. That is, if a character moved from screen left to right, he was good. If he was bad, the orientation was right to left (and I say ‘he’ because there’s but a single token female in the entire movie). Read the rest of this entry »
How about a little equal time for Kung Fu Panda opening sequence hand-drawn goodness?! If you haven’t seen this yet, I recommend you see it on the big screen first. And if you’re extremely spoiler-averse, don’t hit the “Read More” button at all.
After the break, I’ve posted the the section of the Kung Fu Panda end credits (it’s after the break to avoid spoiling it for anyone). I found the whole end credits (here at the Shine site) through Cartoon Brew (hey, Jerry, you misspelled the name of the movie!), and I wanted to highlight the hand-drawn animation. I knew this character animation was done by DreamWorks animators, and what struck me was that I was able to guess who animated what in about half of them. I guess all those years working together on Prince of Egypt, Road to El Dorado, Sinbad, and Spirit had something to do with that.
I’ve suggested a couple of times that CG animators often don’t use enough blinks and interesting blink patterns to show what their characters are thinking and feeling, and in my last post I put up a live-action clip showing how much a good human actor can do with blinks and half blinks and eye flutters. The great Michael Cain gives a counter-point, suggesting that actors NOT blink: Read the rest of this entry »
This will be a shorter post than that on Vanilla Blinks, not because there’s less to say, but because there’s too much. As we saw, there’s a lot of quantifiable information about the generic, spontaneous blinks that we do all the time. Imagine how much could be written about variations on standard blinks!
But instead of trying to write a book, I’m going to point a few things out, post some samples, and leave it to the reader to study the varieties of blink types is the rich reference material we’re surrounded by every day (like, real life, movies, TV, etc.). Read the rest of this entry »
