Doug Sweetland Spline Cast - Part 1
Well, I finally got the chance to edit the Doug Sweetland interview. This is part one. Enjoy and let us know what you think. It is available on iTunes as well. Search for Spline Cast.
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Animation in London
I had the opportunity to teach some animation in London and I wanted to thank all the people that came to the class. It was an amazing experience, being in such a vibrant city. It seems like the animation community in London is really exciting. I only hope I can return one day. I will hopefully posting some missing images from the presentation.
-Andrew
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Presto up on Itunes
Not that Spline Doctors is a place to pimp anything but animation education, I did wat to say that Presto is available on Itunes. Here is a link. Please address any questions about this short in the comments section and myself or Travis or Mark will try to answer them.
Stay tuned for the Doug Sweetland Spline Cast…
Andrew
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Snap or not to Snap?
On the opening day of Wall E and the Short film “Presto” which I had the pleasure to work on with two of my fellow Spline Doctors, Travis Hathaway and Mark Walsh, I thought it would be fun to talk a bit about snappy-ness in animation. When we think of snappy animation, we often think of Ren and Stimpy, or a host of other works such as Pocoyo. Its the way in which we get in and out of poses. In computer animation, snappy timing can be difficult to pull off in an appealing way. If the animation is snappy throughout, it becomes boring to look at and hard for the eye to follow. Some feature films have used this snappy style of animation which has worked for some and others not. I am not saying that we have figured anything out, but for Presto, we wanted an old school style which could be perceived as snappy. We looked back to the golden age of Warners, MGM and Disney. With the Warner cartoons, you have really great, funny drawings and wonderful timing of those drawings. The MGM style seemed to be similar with a bit more polish on the animation side, especially the Hannah Barbara Tom and Jerry’s. In CG, one thing you have going against you is motion blur. Motion blur can be your friend, or soften your work. Brad Bird would agree that motion blur still leaves some room for improvement. The big thing being that you sometimes want the blur to have arcs and its difficult to get that. Another thing is if you hit a pose in a snappy way, how does it settle? For Presto, we had to think about a few things. One was how snappy could you make the animation without it looking stiff and how could we break it up so that it was not always the typical snappy pose to pose. Another is thinking about how things settle naturally. You can have that snap, but how it comes to rest is an important detail that you will see in CG. Also, we thought about what aspect of the character to move. Maybe its a blink or maybe the overlap of the cloth dynamics will give me enough so that the character does not become wooden. Its always important to see how your cloth is simulated in order to adjust the animation to get it to behave correctly. All in all, snappy animation should be used like saffron. Too much will taint the recipe. When its done right, it looks great in contrast with scenes that are animated around it. If the style of the film requires it, it has to fit into the context of the piece and the characters in the film. It was fun and challenging to animate in a style that hearkened back to the old classics. In doing it, I gained a whole new level of respect for the work done in the golden age of animated short films.
-Andrew
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Get down to the Root of things…
I wanted to quickly mention how important the root is in your character. With thinking about all our arcs, and overlap and all the critical principles. We can quickly overlook this fundamental area to pat attention to when you are cleaning up your shot. And that is the root of your character.
In case your asking yourself, what is the root of the character? It is the core part of your character (generally around the hip area) that translates the character forward or back. If for example, you had all your arms and legs on FK, your entire character would move if you moved your character by their root.
So, why is this so important? Well, like we mentioned before, it is the core movement in your character (Top of the group node), so everything is based upon it.
I see many students go into their work, polishing the arms, fingers, head, legs, BEFORE they have nailed down the timing of the root. If the root isn’t working, then your shot will never work, no matter how much you polish everything else. So make sure that it is working how you want it too, before you go and polish other parts of the body.
Below is 1 example of a students work, before they attacked the root. This is 1 of many that I found, and the problem that was happing was that they were focusing on so much at once (arms, hands, head etc), that they forgot to nail down the root. The second example is the same jump, but with the root being finessed. When that was done, there was a little finessing on the feet, to make the jump more believable. But that was done AFTER the root was finessed. I hope you can see the large difference between the two, just from finessing the root.
Before:
After:
Dr. Makarewicz
