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):
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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
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