Whether animating in a bedroom of a major studio, you'll
save hours of time and frustration by reading our top tips and tricks for
animation.
As software and hardware improve, audiences demand more
sophisticated performances. And as deadlines and budgets shrink, animators are
racing against time more than ever.
It’s true that many concepts of character animation will
never change: the 12 principles of Disney’s ‘old men’ are as etched in stone as
any rule. On the other hand, animators need to grow with the industry and try
to continue to deliver work on time and budget.
In putting together these tips, we’ve focused on concepts
that are quick adjustments for animators to make, but that will also continue
to benefit your work as you progress into your career.
The animator's bag of tricks is more important than ever...
01. Animate acting
shots one phrase at a time
It's best to have clear full-body posing in your phrases at
the expense of smooth transitions, especially early on. Animation follows beats
and phrases, each with its own purpose. For a scene in which a store clerk is
helping a customer, one phrase might be him waving as the customer enters; the
next might be him putting his hands in his pockets as he listens to the
customer.
Treat each phrase like its own shot. Reduce your timeline to
display only the phrase you're working on, and create a beginning, middle and
end to the idea being animated.
02. Loosen up when
animating contact
Avoid keying the whole body at the point contact occurs. On
most actions, particularly faster ones, the instant of contact won’t be
captured on 24fps film. More importantly, you’ll bias the movement towards culminating
at the moment of contact, flattening your arcs. If a character picks up a
glass, the arm is the stronger force.
Animate the hand going through the glass, overshooting the
contact point while staying on nice arcs. Now correct the glass position and
constraining of the glass, to make up for the moment of contact missed between
frames.
03. Playblasting is a
huge waste of time
Calm down, don't freak out yet! Of course there’s no
replacement for watching your animation at real-time speed, and you absolutely
must watch your animation this way to be productive. However, hours are lost
every week waiting for previews and playblasts to render. Reclaim your
productive time by creating a layer or a button to hide everything in the scene
except the character and proxy-resolution sets, so you can simply hit Play to
watch the animation.
If you’re working with a rig that’s too heavy to do this,
request a proxy version from your TD or supervisor. Most film-level rigs have a
version created from ‘tin-can’ geometry parented to bones to make this
possible. If this is impossible, at least take notes while watching your
playblasts to avoid re-rendering constantly.
04. Facial animation
is about motion, not just poses
We're often asked whether there are certain poses that
should always be built into face rigs to ensure the character can effectively
express a natural range of emotion. The answer is that real emotion is
expressed with the movement of the face: a lip quivering when a character is
about to cry, the eyes darting around when a person is at a loss for words, or
a character pressing their face tightly to avoid laughing at something.
Treat these moments like gestures of the face and observe
their movement as closely as the poses they contain.
Since some poses aren’t possible with certain character
designs, you’ll have to cheat sometimes. Mike Wazowski from Monsters, Inc has
no nose, but he smells his armpit in the locker room scene at the beginning of
the film. He does this by moving his lips up and down while making the sniffing
noise. This choice clearly demonstrates that we don’t need specific poses or
even anatomy to read facial animation. Without nostrils to flare, we read
Mike’s sniffing action with only the mouth movement; you too can be as clear
and communicative with your facial animation if you study the movement of the
face and not just poses.
05. Mute your
dialogue
Yes, you must listen to your dialogue over and over and over
when you start a dialogue shot to get into the character, the subtext, the mood
and the performance. But later on, when you work through the body mechanics and
full-body gestures, it’s common to rely too heavily on the dialogue to fill in
performance that’s lacking in the body.
The best dialogue shots work as well with the sound muted.
Diagnose the communication in your shots by muting them before showing your
colleagues. If your colleagues don’t get a strong impression of the
relationship between the characters and a good gist of what is being spoken,
your body language is not developed or supportive enough.
Go back into the body and reinforce your pose choices for
the major points. Speak the line totally with the body language before
un-muting the dialogue and working out the lip-sync.
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