Kung Fu style, of course.
And this time is war!!
Well, ok, maybe just showoff...
Comments
Continuing the last post, here's some more kung fu!! :D Planning-man knows some moves: Happy 2009 everybody!!! Long time no post... but... here I am again, back in blogging business :D 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. 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. 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. |
About me
I'm a character animator, visual artist, game dev, and music composer. I like to doodle, write, experiment, and plan my next big thing. I love tech that inspires and enables art. I have a formal background in music composition. And I like to walk around the world and see things up close. Archives
February 2022
|