Kung Fu style, of course.
And this time is war!!
Well, ok, maybe just showoff...
Continuing the last post, here's some more kung fu!! :D
Rough sketches of course, but the animation is fairly complete - most of it on twos, some of it on ones. The "cleanup" and polish will be done in 3D.
Planning-man greets his invisible opponent (from that movie, "The Invisibles"...). Two gestures, although I think the second one is not used (the bowing down thingy): Planning-man knows some moves:
Happy 2009 everybody!!! Long time no post... but... here I am again, back in blogging business :D
This year's New Year's Eve I wanted to hide away from the world and animate... eh, so what?
So I wanted (for a while now) to draw some more 2D animation, as planning for 3D, Jason Ryan style. This is a first shot, and I think I want to animate some more kung fu these days. Kung fu is keeeeewl :D
That's it, Happy New Year!!
Click the play button now!!!
More extreme body poses usually happen in more extreme movement... It might sound more than obvious, but it can be overlooked. I found myself posing the character and twisting its limbs and body in too extreme ways, without a reason, just because I thought it looked cool... but it ended up looking and feeling unnatural. If the character is sitting or just standing, or doing something that doesn't involve much effort in doing it, it should have a more relaxed pose, and there's a difficulty in making a simple relaxed pose natural... you still need to twist and offset things and make the pose look organic, but you have to do it in a subtle way, which is always tough.
On the other way, if you don't deform the body enough in extremes, the animation doesn't have enough punch, or vitality. This can be seen in live action as well, not only in cartoon animation - frame-by-framing though live action reveals a lot of weird, contorted, sometimes horribly deformed poses, when stuff is in movement - you know, like if someone takes a photo of you when least expected... and you look at it and go "ugh, I look like crap, throw it away!!" :) So anyway, the idea is - mutilate your characters' poses and expressions during fast movement. :D
Pose-to-pose animation is "the thing" in animation, it's what everyone does, because it allows the animator to work easier and be in control. It's structured, it's the way to see your final animation in an embryo, and it allows you to control the look of your animation by building carefully planned key poses, with the role of pillars, or skeletons, sustaining an entire architecture. The whole construction relies on them and they can define it more or less clearly. Clarity though, too much of it... I think is a problem. I think a lot of animators take this pose-to-pose concept too literally, or childishly. I'm not the first one to observe this, but I just though I might write about it too, why not.
OK, maybe animation that goes from pose to pose, where you can see the poses clearly, can be cute, cartoony, and it can work in some cases. But I think, for the most part, when you see an animation that goes... pose, zzzzzip, pose, zzzzip, pose... it just looks cheap. There should be life in between those poses, and around a pose, not just a zzzzzzzzip. Anyway, I'm sure anyone would agree with this, it's pretty basic.... but my main comment and the reason I'm writing this here is in fact a different one.
I keep seeing weird acting shot breakdowns, with cool looking poses, that in fact don't help describing a natural, believable flow. The animator goes... OK, let's illustrate "thought"... OK, now that'd be a niiice "thought" pose. OK, let's move to the next second of animation... and let's illustrate fear, the character will zzzzippp into a fear pose because he just realized something... OK, that looks niiiice, let's move to the next pose, which will be more like a question... the character doesn't understand what just happened... OK... niiiiice, let's pose another pose, let's make him look like he's "thinking" again... [and each pose is unique and shockingly unrelated to the others]
What was that?? [quoting Ruby Rhod from 'The fifth element'... "it was baaaaad, it had no fire, no energy, no nothing..." ] :| [I do prefer Ruby Rhod's exaggerated acting to most cartoons btw! He does have the real fire and energy! Cartoons can be more energetic, no problemo, but the detail... the visceral impact of reality... that's hard to draw on paper.]
Does that have anything to do with a breakdown that could lead to natural, believable acting? Of course, I can't really know exactly what some other animator is thinking, with precision... and I've also exaggerated a little (or have I?)... But that's what a lot of animation looks like.... Clean, clear poses that are inbetweened more or less well. That's more like illustration, and less like acting, and definitely not at all like an "illusion of life". The idea is, the animator sets an illustration as a pose, and uses illustrations as breakdowns, instead of thinking of that shot as an actor, instead of trying to describe a real/believable situation with poses... Illustrations are cool, they might capture the intensity of a moment, of a gesture, but... but... but... they're illustrations. Real life doesn't unfold as illustrations. I think the intensity of that moment should rather be captured with timing and spacing (and an understanding of real facial functionality), not with illustrations.
I've been trying to understand gestures for a while now. What's a gesture... weeeell, in a way you could call a pose a gesture. Such as in gesture-drawing, it's only one drawing as a gesture, as an idea, you're trying to capture the essence of that gesture in one pose. But what I'm more interested at the moment is gestures as small bits of action that give detail to an animation. You could also see pose to pose animation as gesture to gesture animation, because it can very well be that, in fact. When I was animating Cousteau a year ago I used to try to simplify his animation and have round, simple movement that doesn't 'bounce' much, I was obsessed with the idea of using soft accents mostly, meaning... instead of hitting hard accents, just keep the movement going forward, and not 'bounce'. The result was lacking real detail though, and I was disappointed. I already wrote some on this lovely matter... here. After a while I realized, in my infinite wisdom (hehehe), that in fact I shouldn't try so hard to remove hard accents from my animation, and I should focus more on the details, and keep a balance of soft versus hard accents, simple vs complicated, etc, based on the context. Which is hard, of course, and I have 100 more years to learn about that, and after 100 years I will know everything. :D Yeah. I still think there is a strange beauty in simple animation with mostly soft accents, and I want to get to know more about that style... while not being so careless with gestures and details.
Anyway, a gesture can be a small elbow movement, or finger movement, or a shoulder hunch... for example, the head usually does a lot of things, animating the head on a simple path with very clean animation that lacks detail, I think in most cases will look lifeless. But add gestures to that movement and all of a sudden it could become alive! I think we can see these gestures as small and large, or maybe small, medium and large... large gestures should probably be planned more carefully and described with extremes and breakdowns, in pose to pose animation, because a large gesture can very well affect the entire body. In fact, I think most gestures affect, even if very subtly, more or less, the entire body. You may think a smaller head gesture might not affect the legs, but I'd say... it often does. Because it's not just a head gesture, it's a... gesture. So it starts with the head... it has a very visible effect on the chest, but it might also subtly affect the hips and limbs. Depends, if it's a really small and especially slow gesture, it can have a smaller area of influence. Small gestures could be added as a layer of detail on top of an initial, cleaner, simpler animation. So... the difficulty is to keep the base animation layer clean, and free of unwanted accents, or jerks. And then add those accents where they're needed. I used to be so afraid of accents... because if they occur at the wrong time and place, the seriously mess up things. But it took me a while to realize that, in fact, accents are good, and necessary, just... when they're placed right, when they're motivated and correct/accurate. Also, it's easy to control the larger ones, but hard to control the subtle accents. Because any contrast, even a small one, will create an accent.
For example, if you animate a stretch, and only try to capture that movement through posing , good timing, and clean paths of action... it will probably lack the tension that would add believability to the stretch. Add some subtle jerkiness where it's needed, where the tension should be, and wow!
I think I should write a post about tension vs relaxation... this is another something I've started thinking about fairly recently.
Just cut a second version of my demo reel - I just had to add my Wolfy... Click below and watch in hi rez (42 MB):
or low rez (9MB):
More or less finished, but the truth is that I didn't refine the animation that much and I shouldn't call it finished yet... But as unfinished as this shot is, it's better than other things I've worked on before... or so I think. I think I'm learning some stuff here, but I also hit another wall - I found myself not being able to refine my animation any further, because I really don't know if what I'm correcting is OK or if I'm only making things worse. This animation thing is really tricky business - I guess I need to understand more about it before being able to go any further. I'm not a fan of working like a locomotive... I think that people who really know what they're doing are successful, while... say... beginners... work hard and with unfortunate results. There's so much polished animation that has really been... polished a lot, I presume, and it still looks awkward, because the animator had an incomplete understanding of what s/he was.... animating... maybe from an acting point of view, or maybe incorrect mechanics (yeah, it's fun and easy to animate shapes, but without understanding the mechanics of motion the results are artificial), or just wrong planning. It's so easy to get carried away by an idea or by some graphical concept, and forget that we're in fact dealing with acting and body mechanics and things that are supposed to be functional, not just cute and graphical.
But yeah, appeal is important too - this is an area I know too little about, and it shows. Comparing my animation to that of others I think mine is less cute... less appealing maybe, I didn't try that hard to make cartoony animation and exaggerated expressions. I tried to go for more realistic reactions or gestures, which is stuff that I find most interesting to animate, and to watch - but hard to do. A cartoon take is a hell lot easier, but I don't like cartoon takes, and I think it's stupid and annoying that people use them aggressively in animation as a replacement for acting. I'm learning about gestures now (I'll post some stuff about gestures soon), and there's so much depth and richness in this microscopical world of the small gestures people make... this is the real beauty. But I'm not good enough just yet, to be able to animate them right... Anyway, more about gestures later, cuz this is awesome stuff!!
When I was animating Cousteau I was trying to get simple smooth movement with very few bounces in there, and most accents be soft - the result was not necessarily soft, but it sure was... somehow... low rez... like an image that doesn't have detail. And at that time I didn't know what was missing and why some people told me that my animation is floaty - I mean, I knew what I was doing, to a point, and I was trying to keep the timing alive, but then I didn't know how to fill those large simple spaces... Lots of animators do moving holds and snappy jumps from one pose to another, and so they jump over the transitions quickly and kill the details - the Spline Doctors I think, in a podcast, they admitted that when they were fresh out of school, they could set a pose, and then another, and another... but what exactly was supposed to happen between those poses they had no idea! Now with me... I guess what happens is... I also have a fairly loose idea, if any, but instead of doing pose jump pose jump etc, I'm actually trying to animate that movement between poses. And because I'm a beginner, the results are... less accurate... :D So now I've started analyzing more video and I hope I'll start understanding more about that space in between poses. To conclude this thing - there's an expression among animators: tight timing. Get tighter timing in there!! Ammm... tight timing is cool, and I suppose people mean "timing with a wider dynamic range obtained by exaggerating it - fast actions become faster and slow movement becomes a subtle moving hold". Well, it can look great when it's done masterfully, like they do it at Pixar, but on the other hand, this is exactly the stuff that can also lead to replacing detail with something that... exaggerated a little bit more... is nothing else but pose - jump - pose - jump... (I guess 'tight timing' could also mean - timing that is more accurate... just like "pushing a pose" can mean exaggerating it, but also making it more accurate - 2 different uses... I prefer the second; in the case of timing though... accuracy isn't in fashion... exaggeration is.)
Anyway, here's the Seinfeld shot rendered (for some reason mental ray decided not to render my hair movement, although I've even baked the hair dynamics - but I decided I like it this way too, I'm done with this shot, and I want to move to something else and get to learn new things):
After a little bit of refinement on the animation, here's the latest edit (this post here will always have the latest edit, as long as the animation remains WIP): Download the file for full rez: DOWNLOAD
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