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! :-)

Shot sizes and cutting

I've been meaning to come back to this topic for a while, so here we are talking about cuts once more :-) I'll go through the different shot sizes and some advice for cutting between them. Basic stuff, but it's good to know a bit about it.

Shot sizes

establishing shot

There are different kinds of shots for different purposes. At the start of a scene there is often an establishing shot, a shot that shows the whole setting establishing where the event will take place.

long shot

A wide (or long) shot shows the scene from a smaller distance than the establishing one, but still includes the environment or setting of the scene.

Next comes the full shot which includes the whole character. Then there is the medium full shot, that starts with the knees and the medium shot, which starts at the waist.

Of course this is rough, because the definition of the limits is not always so tight and the names may vary slightly. The images I'm including to illustrate this are from gettyImages.com.

          

 

 

Full shot

Medium full

Medium

The close shots follow, medium close-up, good to show head motions and how head punctuates what you say. In the face close-up you'll see lots of details in eyes, mouth movements, head motions. Extreme close-ups only show a part of the face. They are reserved for more intense emotional reaction.

             

  

 

        Face close-up

Medium close-up

Extreme close-up

For the shots that are not too close – from full to medium close-up - it's good to include some head room, the empty space above the head. It's important to match this room from wide to medium shots. 

It's good to think about how much the character will move. If he's going to run, he may need more space on screen and if he's sitting still, it's enough to see him only from his waist up and so on.

The head room leaves room for another discussion involving framing: leaving empty space around the character can have different effects. For example, if you leave a lot of empty space in front of a character, he/she can seem more open, if there's more space in the back, we're being kept at a bigger distance. But I guess I'm losing my focus here ;-)

It's also good to mention that usually we keep a bigger distance from the character while we don't know him. So in the beginning of a story we will see the character further away, in a medium or full shot. As we gain intimacy with that character, we get closer to him. Something similar applies to over-the-shoulder cameras filming two characters talking. If they don't know each other yet, the camera won't be so close to the eyeline (an imaginary line from the eyes of one character to the eyes of the other). Once they know each other, we get closer to that line. Check the images below for a more visual example:

closer to eyeline

away from eyeline

Cutting between different shot sizes

When you cut from one camera to another, there are a few things to observe. One of them is you shouldn't cut between camera sizes or angles that look similar, that's called a jump cut and could look like a mistake to the audience: they should understand it's a cut.

Also, when moving from one shot size to the other, if something is moving, it's important to keep the perceived speed the same. So maybe someone is being seen in a full shot leaning forward extending the arm to grab something. When we move to a medium shot, the hand should seem to be moving at the same speed as it was in the other shot. The trick is to know that sometimes the actual speed you'll animate won't be the same in both shots, since when we're closer it seems that the object/character is moving faster.

Ok, this was a quick overview of shot sizes...I will probably go back to cameras sometime soon as they are very interesting ;-)

Playing with 3D Studio Max

Last week was the break week in AM and I used the time to rest and to play a little with 3D Studio Max. Before Maya I had done a small animation in Blender, but it's been a few years and I think it's good knowing at least the basics of other animation software.

I decided to do something really really simple, just to break the ice with 3ds max. I downloaded Max, a free rig lots of people use from this link.

I chose a reference from aniref on vimeo, a cool place to look for (and share) reference.

Here's the video I chose:

And the result of my exercise:

It was interesting and, in a way, simple, after all, the tools used are similar to the ones in Maya. Before starting to animate, I watched the instructional videos that come up when the program is first opened. That helped make me more comfortable with the interface. I found it less friendly than Maya, but part of this is because I'm not used to it.

At one point I didn't know where to find more specific controls like footroll and eyelid movements. Also some general things like navigating and setting materials to locked body parts demanded some getting used to. Well, in the end, I found the answers to my questions in the internet or by pressing buttons and seing what happened :-)