Spontaneous Life : Timing tip

I've seen this article when i was researching on something else. I found it interesting and thought of sharing it to all you guys. It often happens to me i start looking for something and i end up collecting something else .

Life is very much about spontaneity, unpredictability, and surprises. The higher the life form is the more unpredictable and spontaneous it will become. Can you predict about a tree? Yes, you can predict a lot about its position (it cannot run away and surprise you in any way!), natural behavior (its ability to produce fruits, flowers, smell, etc.), and overall look (its color, size, etc.). You can easily say that the tree will continue to stay at its place for years and years and not much will change for it. It’s a lower life form having a lower degree of freedom and thus, quite predictable. What about a monkey! Can you predict much about it? Well, not to that extent. You can just generally predict about its position, natural behavior (reproduction, food habits, etc.), and overall look but specific details are unpredictable. They are all quite variable with time, mood, emotions, etc. A monkey is a higher life form having a higher degree of freedom and thus, quite spontaneous and unpredictable. We humans are still higher in the ladder and even more unpredictable than those monkeys!

In short….. Spontaneity and unpredictability are the properties of life. And where there is life, these properties must be present in one way or another.

As an animator, your job is to create an illusion of life, so you’ll have to spend most of your time creating that ultimate flavor of life by bringing spontaneity and unpredictability in your work (do not take unpredictability as something negative. It’s sometimes good for your animation and adds life to it.). So you’ll spend a lot of your time creating texture and contrast in your timing (holds, offsets/delays), poses (silhouettes, line of action, flow lines), spacing, net displacement (vertical and horizontal), and character behavior/emotions, etc. All this will help you to bring that flavor of life and make your animation stand out. Otherwise, everything will tend to look mechanical and robotic, and there will be no spontaneity of life.

Contrast in timing is very important to natural-looking motion. Even jazz composers break up the rhythms they have created to make their music more interesting (I was a percussionist/drummer in my junior high and high school orchestra so I know this very well!). You need to do the same to your animation and adjust the timing of the motion to have greater impact. The timing of your poses should have a natural feel, a rhythm, texture, and flow, much like great music. The beats and the rests in the music between the verse and the chorus to hold interest, and so should your animation.

Look at the above image. The second hop is a lot quicker than the first one. Notice, the last hop is going higher than the rest. This makes it look more interesting and adds life

So, PLAY with your timing and move your frames around until the timing feels natural. This goes for any kind of animation (CG, 2d, or stop-motion). Nail your poses and then finesse the timing. The finesse step is the most difficult part of animation and also the most important!Hope this helps some of you.

Those who cannot begin do not finish

A perceptive overall distribution of all the below elements concentrates the viewers attention on the vital aspects of the gesture.

as told in walt stanchfield's "those who cannot begin do not finish."

Weight distribution: How the figure balances itself because of what it is doing.

Thrust: Body language usually requires a hip to be thrust out, a shoulder up, knees apart, or an arm out (as in throwing something or pointing), etc.

Angles: Straight up and down figures are generally stiff and static. Angles will add life and a feeling of movement.

Tension: Whenever one member of the body moves there is the set up between it and its counterpart. You can capture an effective by working one elbow against the other elbow, one knee against the other. Likewise the feet, hands, and the shoulders. Never draw one appendage without planning a counter move with its opposite .... never.

Straight against curve: All work and no play makes a long and dreary day - or something like that. All curves and no straights makes a dreary drawing. Straights and curves tie in perfectly with one of animation’s key tools, “squash and stretch”. Straights and curves used indiscriminately is but trickery, but when used logically they can emphasize and clarify the gesture.

Extremes of the pose: Extremes in animation usually mean the farthermost extension of some pose or the drawing just prior to a change of direction. A single drawing also has extremes, which, in a “flash”, explains what is happening in the pose. Those extremes are vital to such an explanation. To the degree they are missing or diluted, the drawing will deteriorate from “expressive” to “bland” to “confusing” to downright “boring”. Silhouette almost explains
“extreme”, but not if it is thought of as a tracing of the outside of the figure. Forces are at play in a gesture and it is force and thrust and tension that generates an extreme.



To gloss over them in a muddled and nebulous way is to cheat the
viewer out of a clear look at what you are trying to “say”.

Animation Seven Essentials

Animation Seven Essentials by glen keane...


1. Make a positive statement. Do not be ambiguous in your approach.Thumbnail until you have that clear approach and conviction. Be bold and decisive.

2. Animate from the heart. Feel your drawings. Let your action be an extension of how you believe the character feels. Put yourself in the place of the character you are animating - associate.

3. Make expressions and attitudes real and living. Focus on the eyes and eyebrows - mouth and cheeks. Always lead with the eyes.Study your own attitudes. Ask yourself does this drawing feel the way my face feels.

4. Draw as if you were sculpting. Describe the forms in dimension. Understand the character design in 3D.

5. Animate the forces. Allow the momentum of and already animated movement to suggest the next drawing. Draw the leading edge of forces.

6. Visualize and feel dialog. Be sure you are truly capturing the inflection, volume and tone of the dialog with proper mouth shapes.

7. Simplicity. What is the essence of your scene, your action , your expression - what is indispensable in communicating your thought?




- GLEN KEANE

Vary Your Antics

Hey all, here i' ve collected some tips for an acting scene. This article by John Kricfalusi , gives a clear idea of antics and overshoots..He clearly tells us about the energy in antics at different levels. He also speaks about exact antic ,timing for accents in animation.

Enjoy the Play!!!






It's important for contrast and naturalness to not use the same exact antic and timing for every accent in your animation.

Here's a short scene of dialogue with 3 accents, plus a couple bookended actions.
Each important pose, the poses that carry the meaning and continuity of the scene needs to be accented. Otherwise every drawing will just float by like levitating soggy cereal. Accents are not all equal and have a hierarchy of importance according to the story, gag or acting. They shouldn't be randomly planned, yet they still have a lot of room for creativity. The accents are usually preceded by an anticipation, which gives each accent more punch.

Accents and anticipations are part of the punctuation of the message. In the best cartoons, punctuation is aided by poetic meter which can add beauty to the presentation of the message.

Start Pose


1) ANTIC 1


2) OVERSHOOT 1 "WOW!"


3) ANTIC 2



- note that this antic is less extreme, because there are less frames to play with.
she has to immediately say "Psy" after "Wow", so I didn't want her to move too far away-just enough to create an accent that matches the dialogue.

4) OVERSHOOT 2 "PSY"


5) ANTIC 3 - "SHRINK TAKE" (a Jim Tyer invention)


6) "KO!" Overshoot 3


7) Settle out of big accent


8) one frame of her dropping down


9) Land and cushion


10) Up into calm dialogue pose

GREG MANWARING TO THE RESCUE

I was posing out the scene where she yells "Wow Psycho!" and wanted it to be wild like the scene at the end of Coal Black.

It kept jerking when I shot it, so I showed it to Greg and he said "Man, it's all there, you just gotta smooth it out. Lemme take a whack at it."

He took his whack and shot it and made it come out all shiny and smooth, saving the day.

I sent him another Sody scene lately that had the same sorts of problems and I'm counting on him to work his magic again.

The rest of the Aoki Pizza commercial was animated at Rough Draft from my layout poses.


Hope you guys liked the articles .I got completely excited when i found this...so , i thought i would share it with you..wow what an article.

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF CLEAN UP

1.Thou SHALT NOT
CONCENTRATE ON A CLEAN LINE
BUT RATHER ON A GOOD
DRAWING

2. Thou SHALT NOT
CLEAN UP ANY DRAWING UNTIL
YOU HAVE ROLLED IT WITH THE
PRECEDING DRAWINGS AND
THE DRAWING FOLLOWING IT

3.Thou SHALT NOT
WASTE ONE LINE. EVERY LINE
MUST ENHANCE THE POSE,
MOOD, ACTION OR CHARACTER

4. Thou SHALT HAVE
NO OTHER IMAGES BEFORE
YOU BUT THE BEST. YOUR TASK IS TO
GET THE STRONGEST POSSIBLE
IMAGE ON THE SCREEN

5. Thou SHALT NOT
OVER EXPLAIN

6.Thou SHALT TREAT
EACH CHARACTER AS A MASS,
MOVING IN SPACE, AND
INFLUENCED BY GRAVITY

7. Thou SHALT LEAN ON
THOSE WHO GIVE YOU WHAT
YOU ARE LACKING

8.Thou SHALT NOT
LEARN THINGS TO CRYSTALLIZE
KNOWLEDGE BUT SHALT LEARN
PRINCIPLES TO APPLY
CREATIVELY

9.Thou SHALT THINK
VOLUME

10.Thou SHALT BE
CAREFUL BUT NOT TIMID

AS YOU WORK KEEP IN MIND

The attitude of the character.

Construct all the poses with a proper LINE OF ACTION.

“FEEL” the weight of the character.

Think like an animator. Keep the whole scene in mind as you work on the single pose.

Find ways to simplify your poses.

Keep a close eye on dialogues. Keep mouth shapes simple.

Use curved line of actions for flow, sag, softness and appeal.

Use straight line of actions for tension, compression and strength.

Don't let poses get stiff, keep a feeling of floe to the pose.

Eye direction - Make sure that the character is looking where it should.

Twist and tilt body relationships.

Follow through and Overlapping actions

FOLLOW THROUGH AND OVERLAPPING ACTION :

The termination of an action and establishing it relationship to the next action.They define ease and flexibility of the character.When the main body of the character stops all other parts continue to catch up to the main mass of the character,such as arms, long hair, clothing, coat tails or a dress, floppy ears or a long tail (these follow the path of action). Nothing stops all at once. This is follow through. Overlapping action is when the character changes direction while his clothes or hair continues forward. The character is going in a new direction, to be followed, a number of frames later, by his clothes in the new direction. "DRAG," in animation, for example, would be when Goofy starts to run, but his head, ears, upper body, and clothes do not keep up with his legs. In features, this type of action is done more subtly. Example: When Snow White starts to dance, her dress does not begin to move with her immediately but catches up a few frames later. Long hair and animal tail will also be handled in the same manner. Timing becomes critical to the effectiveness of drag and the overlapping action.

Follow through and overlap can be achieved by proper posing at breakdowns and in-betweens .And there is a great tool in maya called DOPE SHEET for adjusting the timing for each and every individual part of the character ,where we can play around and offset the keys for follow through.

BODY MECHANICS :

Body Mechanics is a vast subject where every animator should go deep and research on it.Body Mechanics is all about understanding the physicality of animation.Body mechanics deals with many interesting and important things like energy, force , weight, line of action, power centres etc.
It is a study about which part of the body to move first and which parts to follow it and about reducing stress on the characters body.

WEIGHT :


In the search of believability within animation, the weight is one important element.It modifies the way the character or object will move or interact. It is important to understand that we are animating masses and not lines or polygon meshes.The observation is once again the
key to achieve proper weighting in animation.While the character or object weight is part of the observation process alone, interacting with
weight requires weight anticipation.





BREAKDOWNS :

The center pose between the extremes is the passing pose . It define hOW you pass from one extreme to the next extreme and thus has a crucial impact onto the animation since there are infinite number of ways to do so. Breakdown is one best drawing or a best pose that defines how to get from one extreme to the other extreme.It decides the the way of animation from one key to the other.

IN-BETWEEN :

That is when the subtlety of the movement kicks in. The in-between will define the cushioning and spacing between the key and the breakdown pose. In-betweens are the drawings or poses which gives more definition to the animation.It is about how things move between poses.It is process of giving more flow and fluidity to the animation.

Check list while animating

Hey howdy !!! Now i will be discussing about some important things that every animation must have in the scene to make it look real and lively.This is like a small check list . you can make this as one of the pass in your work flow. Very soon i will be posting my way of approach to a shot which shows my work flow. Ok then lets start.

TWINNING :

In posing it is important that you avoid twinning as much as possible. Like, never pose in such a way that any body parts are symmetrically posed.Suppose in a jump let one hand come a little later than the other which gives some sense and life in the animation.As no two body parts are symmetrical and move at the same time and same way. Don't let both the hands move the same way from one pose to other as it looks unreal and leads to dull animation.

Most of the animation theory one comes across propagates the notion that twinning stuff is always BAD, and if you have twinned actions then you will have seven years of bad luck, and shame will besmirch your good name. Why is it seen as bad? Well, it can be a holdover from people's blocking, or by paying little attention to the forces driving an action. Having Cedric hit his pose with all his twinniness(tm) going on makes him look mechanical - as if a robot control system were driving the movement rather than an organic brain operating body parts under gravity. The slower the movement, the worse twinned movements can appear, too. Yikes!


ARCS :

All actions, with few exceptions (such as the animation of a mechanical device), follow an arc or slightly circular path. This is especially true of the human figure and the action of animals. Arcs give animation a more natural action and better flow. Think of natural movements in the terms of a pendulum swinging. All arm movement, head turns and even eye movements are executed on an arcs.

All human actions result in arcs.This is because there are 3 categories of skeletal joints in human body namely - ball and socket, hinge and irregular. It is because of these joints that a human is able to move a particular body part in a certain direction. All these movements occurs in an arc without distorting or losing its proportions.

When animating if we are not maintaining arcs, the animation of the character seems mechanical and robotic. As mechanical things do not maintain arcs in its motion, they are robotic and move linearly. So you should always be sure about checking the arcs all the time to make the animation look real and lively.

MOVING HOLD :

Moving hold is one of the most important aspects in CG character animation. It nothing more than an ease. It is about holding a pose for few frames . That is just duping the Pose after few frames to establish a hold and adjusting the pose slightly setting into the flow of the animation.If you doesn't adjust the pose and leave it as the same , i stops dead and doesn't move ,it just dies for some reason. So we have the pose moved slightly which syncs into animation and held for some duration. This gives life into those frames and makes the animation alive.