more on texture…
Here’s a scene from the Robert Altman film, The Player. I had been thinking about this post for a while and after reading Gordon’s latest I thought this would be a perfect extension of his point, but more related to dialogue as opposed to pantomime.
Watch Grant (the British dude) pitch part of his movie idea to Tim Robbins, a studio executive. Robbins’ performance is equally as interesting for all the subtext going on but I won’t spoil that for you. Here we’ll examine the texture of Grant’s performance in his body acting while he’s talking. Normally I wouldn’t advise hitting beats so “on-the-nose” as he does, as it tends to flatten a performance: why illustrate with the body exactly the words the character is saying? And certainly if all he had done was hit the obvious poses, the scene would be boring, or even worse, annoying. I want to talk not about the poses he hits, but what he does in between them that makes this scene so entertaining.
Take, for example, the first close up scene of Grant as he explains the car accident investigation. An animator would find it very easy and tempting to skip right from the “brakes have been tampered with” to the pose for “murder.” But Grant makes it interesting and convincing by doing a hilarious anticipation before the line. I broke the beat down into the five keys I’d pose for his action:
1) “brakes have been tampered with”
2) eyes close, head up
3) head down, hands up
4) hands hit down: “it’s”
5) head up to look at Tim Robbins: “murder”
(You’ll probably note that he actually hits a slightly different pose for “murder” before arriving and holding at the one I picked.)
Now he’s not just illustrating the line, he’s added a whole new urgency to it, and subtext that reads “no if’s, and’s or but’s, it’s murder!” And he’s broken up the action by having his hands follow his head as a second accent. He’s also acting within poses very economically; long holds with subtle texturizing movements. He’s covered all the principles! This whole scene is chock full of such juiciness (including preceding lines I cut for time). Look at the antic for the running action or the dramatic pause before “there’s not a dry eye…” And these are extreme examples; in animation even a two frame eye antic *before* your body antic can help show thought process and make a scene more entertaining. Bottom line: characters thinking = believability. Believability = entertainment.
Look for places to do this in your work!
-trav
Dr. Gordon
Hey Dr Hathaway! Thanks for this post. Really great observation and a great clip.
-Andrew
Bobby Pontillas
Thanks for your insights and examples Travis. Great way to kick off your spline dr. posts.
Can you recall the last time you did something like this in a particular scene?
I’m always interested to see the particular things animators have observed in films or in real life, and have applied them to their animation work. How they’ve caricatured, delineated, simplified, or exaggerated certain elements of human nature seems like a very personal thing and differs from animator to animator.
Nate Lane
Awesome! love the breakdown of the acting choices. This is by far my favorite type of post, just these little breakdowns of whats going on, and maybe why. Would love to see breakdown of animated shots, in the same manner as this.
Anyways, Thanks for the awesome posts!
Matthew Lyons
First off thank you so much for this blog. I’ve become interested in animation through illustration and I find these blog posts really helpful. I didn’t realise just how interested I was until I found this blog. It’s lovely to read straight to the point tips on a nice clean site.
I also feel the same as Nate Lane and love this type of blog post. The way you’ve laid it out with each picture and the video makes it really easy to understand what you are explaining in this post.
Keep up the good work!
Vince Gorman
I’ll echo the appreciation for this type of post, very hands-on. Thank you for that. I stepped through the antic and poses you were talking about before the “running” gesture, wow! It’s interesting when he winds up for “Breaks into the prison…” and then realeses, both the head and arms move and hit their extremes on the exact same frames! I’ve always thought this would be a quick way to stiffen up and kill your animation.
BUT then the left hand bounces right back, then right hand, and head pretty much holds. Which works really well. I think we have the tendency, as studiers of the 12 principles, to always avoid certain things as a if it’s a hard rule (moving and hitting on the same frames, or twins, or), but as this example illustrates, you don’t think about the “rules” when you’re acting. The physicality is very secondary to the emotions. Anyway, thanks for the post, hope I didn’t convolute or twist your point.
Nate Lane
Yep i’ve been noticing the same thing… that a lot of the time some of the principles don’t really apply. I’m just beginning my education but the more I observe, the more I convince myself that when animating I can get the best possible performance if my mind isn’t set on the principles themselves. I’m not saying to ignore the principles, I’m just thinking that you should master them, drill them into your head so that you couldn’t animate without using them, and once you’ve done that, completely forget about them. That’s what I think sets great animators apart from the rest.
toby
great post and good looking new site!
Sant Arellano
I was having a bit of a debate in my class regarding the 12 principles.
The thing is, the guys that came up with the 12 principles, came up with them AFTER animating a ton of things! So for them, the 12 principles were a guideline to always acheive the type of animation they wanted.
We knew the 12 principles way BEFORE we even got to animate a character (well, at least many of us are learning that way). So by learning a principle by reading about it or watching animated exaples, we’re saving a lot of trial and error and observation. I think this is a good thing and a bad thing, because we aren’t being as observative as we should.
We should be creating our own principles as well, as we go through our careers.
And texture is great because it applies to realistic animation and exaggerated animation, all this texture Grant is displaying would look great in animation.
Also, one may think that this type of texture works only with “over-the-top” characters like Grant, but it doesn’t, look at Tim Robbins’ character as well, his expressions have a lot of texture: the way he looks to the other side when the other guy says “cut to the chase”, the way, the little blinks he makes out of inner lack of patience, the subtle sigh he makes after taking lowering his hand, the way he predicts “but he falls in love with the wife” and then outline a small “yeah..” to mark his feelings of “i’ve heard this one before”.
Great post! And good first contribution Travis!
Sant
Nathan Jones
Wow, what a great post, thank you for taking the time to break it all down for everyone. Great examples of the point. Thanks Travis
Dr. Hathaway
Glad you guys find this stuff interesting. As for myself, I’ve been watching a lot of netflix these days and even on first viewing can’t keep myself from rewinding and framing through stuff, even though I try to be a stickler for watching a movie all the way through in one sitting.
Re: the 12 principles, I agree with what you guys are saying, that they should be treated more as guidelines, but they’re a good place to start. Like Sant said, when Frank and Ollie outlined them in the Illusion of Life, they’d been figuring out how to animate for almost half a century already! Really, you should do whatever you need in a scene to make the character feel believable in the world in which he/she resides. The rules are different for each film, and the most successful animation takes those rules and runs with them.
As your eye gets honed you’ll start to see more and more of what in your animation breaks those “rules” so you can fix it. I don’t have a specific checklist I go by, but I will watch a few scenes in continuity over and over for half an hour until I can pinpoint what I’m doing wrong.
As Vince notes in the running gesture in the clip, it’s not against the law to hit two body parts at the same time. But varying the timing and texture of the parts after the hits keeps it from feeling stiff. (Do keep in mind that clip is running at 15 fps, so at 24 fps those parts might actually have originally hit at different frames. Of course, real life moves at infinite fps, but that’s another post…) On the other hand, hitting every single part on different frames can make a complete mess and soften the impact. One of the great things about CG is experimenting with timing in that regard is fairly easy.
Re: Bobby P. I’m working on getting a reel up and running, but to answer your question, in most of my Remy stuff I tried to work little eye antics in before lines, or before big actions. His eyes are a great contrast to his blueish coat, so that kind of thing reads really well. I animated a scene early on when they find a mushroom and Remy reaches into Emile’s paper bag to grab a piece of cheese: “…and not just any cheese, tomme de chevre de paix!” As he takes a big whiff of the cheese before that line, his eyelids flutter, and then open wide right before he says the line. I wanted to convey the recognition of the cheese before he tells Emile what it is. Or after he says, “this would go beautifully with my mushroom!” his eyes go wide again to show a new thought has just entered his mind, then he stands up and he says, “AND!…” and runs out. Those eye beats weren’t called for by the director, but there’s space for them, and I wanted to show thought process between the lines to show this fevered mile-a-minute train of thought going on in Remy’s head. Hopefully it worked!
trav
Graham Ross
Great example! Thanks!