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?