Am I done Yet?

Working till this happens will not get you inspired results

 The purpose to storytelling is to tell a story. Duh. However we can go further than that. What is a story? Well, we have our beginning, middle and end. But then there is alsothe  moral to the story too. I guess that’s the core right? What about the premise? The synopsis? Further still. Storytelling is all about emotion. Deep right?

    Emotion probably isn’t what your thinking about. It’s not a sad thirteen-year-old crying in his room. Emotion is just a more descriptive form of saying how it feels. What was the feeling in the first 20 minutes of Wall-E? Couldn’t you feel the emptiness? How about after EVE goes into lockdown? Doesn’t Wall-E feel like he lost everything? Part of this is due to how the director staged the shots, but also how the animators made Wall-E move. What if you get a shot of a guy skateboarding? How do you know when you are done with this?

    First thing’s first, you can’t know when you are done until you know what it is you are trying to achieve. Can’t get to where your going until you know where it is you want to be, right? If this was just a straight 250 frame shot from AM and not apart of a project as a whole, I would first decide what I what I want to convey in my shot. Let’s say I choose a skateboarding jump. I want to portray that heightened sense of things. The way it feels as if time sorta slows down at the peak of the jump and I am almost floating in air and that I am really pushing my body and it’s making a super dynamic pose.

    Have you ever seen someone skateboarding? It’s certainly not very dynamic. Video certainly can’t replicate that feeling, sure they try to by playing it back in slow motion but we have control over our character.

    From here it is pretty simple. I don’t playback the shot a thousand times throughout working on it. I try to playback the shot as few times as possible during blocking and refinement and just scrub the timeline to see the motion in short bursts so I haven’t tainted my eyes or tarnished my initial reaction to feel something that really isn’t there. I don’t usually organize my workflow by blocking, refinement and polish, but I would have to say that blocking is when I place my poses in the scene, down to 4’s possibly. Refinement is when I refine the mechanics of the shot and make sure there is weight and balance, playing back the shot in realtime only a few times to get the beats right. And polish is when I finally playback the shot often keeping in mind what I was originally seeing in my head and the feeling I want to convey. I polish off what I feel should be tweaked in order to get that feeling across, depending on what I’m trying to get across that can be arcs, posing, secondary actions, anything.

    In this case I wanted the poses dynamic and so I might play with the Y translate a little to get that slow motion feel that your higher up for longer than you actually are.

Probably make the curve look more like an upside down ‘U’ rather than an upside down ‘V’.

    

    All in all, it’s pretty simple really. You just have to decide in the earliest stages of your planning what it is you want to portray in your shot and make sure you keep that idea in your head throughout the process. Most people confuse this with portraying some sort of action, but it will be easier on you to decide when your done if you try to convey a feeling rather than an action.

    There are an infinite number of ways to portray an action, how do you know when that’s done? There are also an infinite number of ways to achieve the feeling you want to portray, but only one way to feel that feeling. If you have that sense of feeling you wanted and there is nothing you want polished on the technical side of things (such as overlap, fingers, etc.) then why are you still working?

Feeling Visually

Glen Keane expresses what an action feels like beautifully

We are storytellers. As animators, we may not be writing an entire story and only working on a simple 50 frame shot, but that doesn't change the fact that you are a storyteller.

    Thus, I would recommend on top of the stockpile of animation books you have to catch up on, film books and storytelling books are just as important.  Film is a form of visual storytelling. Taking a story and through images instead of words, expressing it to the audience, taking them on a journey if you will. So, as an animator, you are to a small degree a film maker. Your film is your 2 second shot or 5 second shot. Sure a lot of the planning may have already been completed. The director may have already staged the shot, might have already voiced the shot and gotten it to such a degree of completion that all it needed is the models to move.
What do I mean by feeling? Aren't emotions the goal of the scene? Well, no. Emotion is very important, and you should concentrate on it. Focus on the emotion of your character and work to get that across as clearly as you can. But while emotion will be present (and should be always on your mind), there is something that will ALWAYS in EVERY shot be more important. I'm talking about the reason for animation, the purpose of art, the ultimate goal of visual storytelling. Feeling.

    That still leaves 90% of the shot in your hands. Yes, camera angle, sound, dialogue, etc are big factors in setting the mood of a shot. But YOU are in control of the character. The biggest thing people will relate to, the other stuff is subliminal and yes it is very important in film making but the audience will directly relate to the characters on screen. For that exact reason, it is so important to get in touch with the emotion in your shot, but more importantly, the FEELING.

Pixar is great at putting feeling in animation. Watch the ping

pong scene and his hands after he watches the iPod

    When I swing a golf club in real life, I can FEEL the stretch in my body as I twist. When I dive of a diving board, I can FEEL the squash of my body as I bounce before my jump and I can FEEL the stretch running through my body as I straighten out preparing to enter the water.

    As an animator, this is what I fail to see 99% of the time. Feeling is often overlooked and not thought about, animators will just grab a controller and start moving it around. Well the rig is completely loose, when we draw, we can draw whatever we want. It should be our main goal to get the audience to feel that action without even doing it and just seeing it on screen.

    How do you do that? That a constant struggle with the most accomplished animators. I will plan my keys, breakdowns, timing and spacing. When I act out the scene in reference, I pay close attention to where I FEEL the force in body, the strain of my muscles. Thats where I put my breakdown and pay attention to where that should happen in between my two keys. Now its just finding where it goes on the timeline, should it go directly in the middle? 99.9% of the time no, it favors one side or the other. I try to pause my animating and think about the action and where it should go in relation to the keys, this will build my experience and this is how classic 2D animators would work. They would have to know where that breakdown went before seeing it on screen.

    I can't tell you how to get feeling into your shot, I can just explain how I do it. But the important thing is you keep it in the front of your mind while animating. With the computer creating perfectly mathematical inbetweens, it's easy to to overlook feeling and just see that the character is moving.

Be conscious of what life feels like. Now animate it.

Glen catches what an action feels 

like as early as thumbnails

Golden poses vs. posing

   I hear a lot of misconception between the difference between posing your character and finding your main storytelling poses for a shot.

    You see, there are two different kinds of poses. There will be your ‘golden poses’, only a couple poses that will tell the story or performance of your character. Then there is posing your character, these usually happen in breakdowns from a character going from one place to another.

    For instance, a walk cycle has 4 poses in it, but are they going to be your storytelling poses in the scene? Of course not, they ASSIST the golden poses to help explain the story of the shot. 

    In planning, I will draw out my golden poses, really spend some time with them to make sure they say everything I want to say. Then I will draw out my major breakdowns. This is just as important as the golden poses as this is where the animation happens. Rarely would I even draw out more than one pose to indicate a walk.  (Be wary of over-acting as well. Ollie Johnston would only use two golden poses in a shot, there is no need to go around adding poses all over the place)

    Basically, the amount of keys you have is a workflow issue. The amount of poses you have is a performance thing. You can have lots of keys without a lot of poses. Running the tires in the obstacle course, your character would be moving around WITHIN a ‘try-to-stay-balanced” pose. There would be lots of keys, but ONE pose.

"Stick to your Golden Poses"

           - Ollie Johnston