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