Animation Blindness

After working on one shot for a long time, it's not difficult to become blind about that particular animation. The best thing to do is ask for feedback from people with fresh eyes and rest your own  while eating a chocolate to get back with a refreshed view of your shot. In case that's not possible or if it'll take too long to get comments, there are a few tricks to help see your animation with a different perspective:

1) make it black and white. This is not such a strong change, but might help a bit since you take away some of the usual visual input.

2) if there's sound, turn it off to feel the movements better. Of course, the sound is an important part of the work and the animation needs to be in sync with it, but sometimes this helps a bit to feel the accents, the weight...it helps you get less distracted.

3) hide a part of the character. When the body seems to work, but the arms or head don't you might lose focus about what exactly is or isn't working. So hiding a body part is a good way to make sure you see if the hips are working, then the lower spine and so on. As always, first the root needs to be working before correcting the other parts. So you might want to hide all the rest and check the root – usually it's the hip. You can hide it using the software making the parts you want not visible. Or, if it's a simple movement, you can even hide it with your finger (if it's just the head during a walk for example).

4) track! Track the hip, heels, hands, nose and other parts of your character to make sure you have nice arcs when you should. There are some moments when you don't want nice smooth arcs, but more often than not, you want them. This won't give you a new perspective, but if you're looking for something to improve, tracing the arcs is a good idea.

Tracking the hip

5) flip the animation. This is a very simple thing, but it is really powerful :-) One way is flipping it in a software, like quicktime or windows movie maker. The other, a lot faster and easier is using a mirror.

Oh, and if you have any other suggestions, please share! :-)