Hello everyone, sorry for such a long delay in posting. Work on Up has kept us very busy.

Now,…on with the post!

A mentor of mine once told me (enter dramatic music here)

“Being an animator!……is being a decision maker!”

Well….maybe it wasn’t as dramatic, but it was told to me. I didn’t realize this important point until much further in my career as an animator. It sounds rather mundane. Well of course you have to make decisions, how else will you get things done. But you see, one of my problems as an animator has always been about possibilities. A piece of dialogue can be animated a million ways. Even a Zillion ways. So I’ll just rack my brain, and second guess myself every step of the way. So which way is the right way? What do I do? Do I bring the brows up first, and then down later? Do I gesture with the right arm or the left arm? Where do I put in the blinks? Should I move him now, or wait till the line is done?

So many question’s right? And here’s where the piece of advice really kicks in.

Ultimately, something has to be picked. So make decision, and stick to it. Don’t have regrets, don’t look back.  Just take it and run with hit.  Let’s call it, Pick and stick. If you over think it it’ll drive you crazy and you’ll never get anything done! Of course spend time planning the shot but just be a decision maker when it comes down to it.

But make a choice, stick to that choice, and commit everything you have in your animation arsenal to make that choice the best it can be. Don’t be wish washy! If you are always worried if you made the right choice you will end up having a ½ baked idea. So if I am trying to decide between 2 choices,…I’ll make my choice an commit to it 100%.

But how do I make my choice?

You make your choice by gathering up as much information as possible about your scene and character, and trying to narrow it down. Your scene will always have a purpose. The reason it is in the film.

Let’s say a character walks in and has to tell his wife that he lost his job. The purpose of the scene is to relay that information.

Well….what is that character going through? Let’s say the director wants the character to feel hesitant about delivering this news.

OK,…Every choice you make from now on,…should be to support the character feeling hesitant. How he walks, gestures, makes eye contact etc. Knowing your character will help as well. Linguini might deliver the news differently than Skinner. The parameters are the same with the scene, but the characters themselves have severely different personalities. So if you had a question about your shot, you want to ask yourself how would someone like Skinner (or Linguine) act? So if I am stuck between 2 perfectly good choices, I consistently find myself deleting 1 of those choices because I do not believe the character themselves would act that way. Linguini is very insecure, and Skinner is very strong headed. While the goal is the same, the path getting there might be quite different because of how different their personalities are.

I hope that helps you become a stronger more confident animator. Remember, make a choice, and give that choice your undivided attention, otherwise, we may never get things done.

Dr. Makarewicz

There are many different ways to approach a scene which contains a character walking. The first thing you need to figure out is what the scene is about. Is it a one off shot of a character walking into frame and saying a line? Is it a series of scenes of one or more characters walking and talking. I have worked on both types and many variations. When I was working on The Incredibles, I got a bunch of shots with Edna and Bob walking through her home talking about the past when he brings his super suit to be repaired. The best way to approach a bunch of shots like that was to create two really good walk cycles and plop them on a path. Then layer the acting on top of the walk. The best way to layer the walk on top is to use controls that let you animate on top of what you already have. Obviously you have to alter things like the arms in order to gesture, and the head to hit accents of dialogue, but the cycle you create is the key ingredient.

Now, what about a one off shot? A cycle is usually not the way to go, but I have seen it done well. An example of this was a shot in The Incredibles that animator Dave Devan did. It is of Dash in the cave with violet. He get up, says, “Well I’m gonna look around now” After he blocked in the character getting off the floor, he plopped in the walk cycle and showed the shot for a first pass to Brad. Once the basic idea and acting is approved, the walk cycle can be massaged so that the transition from the keyed animation to the cycle does not look bad. You never want the audience to see that the walk cycle is in fact, a cycle. You want to mess it up a bit and vary the timing of things and make it feel more organic.

The last case scenario would be the shot where you are basically keying the walk from start to finish. I am working on a shot like that now. First, I try to figure out where I want my character to be walking. You can either use a path or straight X,Y, Z controls. Then I start blocking the key poses of the walk by doing the legs first. I usually block on 4’s. I am thinking about the stride pose, the passing pose and back to the stride again.  I inserted the images from Richard Williams book for a quick reference. Once I get that blocked in, then I can start thinking about the details of the push off and the timing of how the legs arrive at each key. It isn’t easy to do a good walk. In fact, its one of the more difficult things to pull off well. One of the most important things is making it feel in balance. You can only cheat so much. Your character really needs to feel like they are in the world. Once the legs are in then you can start getting into everything else like the acting, torso, arms, head, etc etc. In another post we can focus on the acting with a walk. This one is just a warm up to give you a tiny insight about how to approach 3 different types of shots that contain a walk. Again, no way is right. Its what works for you.

-Andrew

A Lot of time students ask if they should use Inverse kinematics or Forward kinematics on things like arms. It all has to do with the shot and what is going on. Lets say a character is leaning on a desk, then gestures and picks up a cup of coffee and drinks it. it makes sense to use inverse kinematics until his hand leaves the desk, then switch to FK for the gesture and picking the cup and drinking it. But this is not the only way to do it. Ultimately it will come down to making it look natural. We want to avoid the look of a puppet on strings. Sometimes IK on arms can cause this look. That is why the gesture is animated using FK. When the arm is on the table it makes sense to have the joint solved by IK. It would be a compositional nightmare to do it another way. Being able to control the pick up of the cup and putting it to the mouth is up for debate about when and if IK is really necessary. If you can pull it off with FK, then it is a good approach. Its important to keep things as simple as possible. Turning on and off IK can be difficult especially if you have to change the scene. Another thing to take into consideration is when to use arm alignment. Basically, arm align gives you a bit more control over the patterns of your acting. If you rotate the characters root, the arms will not be as affected by that rotation. It gives you a bit more control, especially for acting shots. I usually have this on. It tends to make the character look a bit more organic but can also cause a bit of a head ache if you are doing alot of rotations with the characters body.

I used to know an animator who animated all his gestures using IK. I never understood how he did it. The point is that people will use what they feel comfortable with. There is no one way, but you can save yourself a lot of headaches if you use the right tool for the right project. I’d love to know how people work and what has worked for them.

-Andrew

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

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

First, lets just look at some of the “controls” our face has…

Interesting clip…. That one made the rounds in the department…

This next clip from “There Will Be Blood” Shows a lot of facial details that really add to the acting and intensity of Daniel Day Lewis’s performance. Its the stuff he does between his lines that draws you in. How he pushes his lips up, the changes and micro expression. Its a great movie to watch for acting as well as everything else.

That’s all for now. Look for some more stuff coming soon.

-Andrew

the-player

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

Recently, I have been involved in the process of choosing animation interns for our summer animation internship. We have had hundred and hundreds of reels. I wanted to talk about some of the things that make a reel interesting.

1) Lets talk about the most simple – make sure it works well. Believe it or not, many people dont check if it works. If possible have a back up

2) Title and format – Simple is better. white over a black background is all that is necessary. Also, organize the dvd so that I can just hit play and look at the work. I dont need 10 chapters with sub chapters. Make it easy as possible for me to view the work.

3) What to begin with – Basically, you want to grab the attention of the viewer with the best work possible. Don’t save your best stuff for last. It may never get seen. Thats not to say that you should not put good work at the end of a reel. Always start strong and end strong.

4) Same old, Same old - If I see another canned physical test I might go crazy. We see alot of the same thing over and over. Whether its an animation mentor character jumping on some poles, or the same ringling assignement where you have to model yourself and animate a piece of dialogue…. It all starts to blend in. I want to see original ideas. Stories, interesting acting. Remember, its always about the ideas and acting abilites. Polish can be taught. Focus more on coming up with original acting and good ideas. The problem with many animation schools these days is that they seem to be copying each other. We see many different reels that contain similar models. If possible, create your own character designs.

5) Cover letters and reel breakdown. Keep the cover letter simple. Don’t try and write an essay about why you think you should be the one. It will always come down to the work. The cover letter and resume are glanced at. I often find it interesting that students have business cards that say character animator on them. They are really nice and glossy. Sometime, the presentation impresses me, but what I find is that the work on the reel did not have as much put into it as the dvd case and fancy cards. Also, you are a student, not a character animator. Less is more…

In closing, animation has come a long way since I was a student. We have higher standards. The important thing to understand is that good ideas will always win out. Show me an interesting character, not the same damn thing I’ve seen over and over. Be original with your characters, ideas, acting… everything.

-Hope this helps a little.

Andrew

Carlos Baena just updated his website and it has loads of great animation resources…

Check it out

Carlos Website

Slow-in and Slow-outs no problem create a prim sphere and just have it move from one side of the screen to another and back again or have it move around the screen slowing in and out of certain key positions. Quick and easy. Want to focus on Drag create a prim box moving up and down and around the screen picking one corner or edge of the box to lead while the other end drags behind.

None of these are going to go on your reel, but hopefully you’ll get a better understanding of the animation principles. That way you can put them together in a more complex piece of animation you would put on your reel. You’ll also get a better understanding of how to use your tools. You might focus one time trying to animate the slow in and slow out of a ball moving around just with the graph editor with just keys at your main poses. Or you might animate something in stepped mode animating every frame so you get a better understanding of spacing and how that relates to the graph editor. Maybe you have a problem with things strobing all the time in quick moves. This is a perfect way to help figure out to solve that problem. Without the pressure of an acting piece or pressure from anything you are free to experiment and mess up and try again because they don’t take very long, and no one is going to see them. Just like working out it’s the end result we are working towards.Dr. Stephen G.