So as promised yesterday, I would start basically recording down what I did for the four day animation test for Oktober, a lot of this stuff you guys and gals probably already know if you are experienced animator, and most of it is just common sense I guess, but I hope it can enlighten you a little bit or it's pleasing to read :).
Planning, that is where it's at, I spend the whole first half of the day planning, not animating, not even touching Maya. I can't stress how important the planning phase of a animation piece is, the more time you spend on the planning the less time you will be spending trying to get the movement right or the mechanics correct, and it always amazes me how fast I seem to animate when I have a good plan. Of course there will be times when there is just no time for planning especially if you are in a deadline or crunch time for a animation studio sweating to get the last few shots in, but it's always good to do a little bit before hand, even if it's a quick sketch or two. So what I did was take my camera with me to the office where I am currently working (Because they have huge open spaces in the boardroom, and I just shove tables to one side :P), take as much video references as I need. I think it always a good idea to do some video references, even if you have a rough idea of what your character is going to do, not only will you feel the movement and understand the weight and balance of the animation, you yourself will start doing these very natural secondary actions without thinking, and it's those little things that can break cliche poses and movements.
After spending a good amount of time recording myself, and making a fool of myself (Luckily it was a Saturday, where no one was around), I would go back to my laptop, and start studying the video references. As I watch through the reference, I will start picking out key poses and draw them down on my sketchpad, I will usually end up with a few key poses that relate to the overall animation piece. Now here is the bit that I think you don't pick up when you are learning to animate, and it's the most obvious thing in the world, once you have the key poses down, stop and start thinking about how the character will go from one pose to the next, seriously! I mean act it out if you have to, start thinking about where the foot will land, how will the arm swing across to the next pose, and this is the best time to experiment with things, experiment with inbetweens, and start thinking "Oh! What if I have the hand here how will that flow through", start drawing in the inbetweens and experiment!
Once I had the planning down and at this stage I will have pretty much my key poses and inbetweens, dictating the overall movement from pose to pose, I will also have frame numbers in for each pose to pose, it helps by giving me an idea of the timing for each movement. When I first started, it was really confusing for me how animators understood what the number of frames meant, and I am only now starting to figure it out, what I understand now is the following:
- 1 frame, yeah you don't really want to have anything moving at 1 frame.
- 2-3 frames is really fricken fast, snappy speeds.
- 4-5 frames is actually close to being normal speed in most cases.
- 5-10 frames is actually really slow
So with the planning sorted, I was ready to start animating and I will leave the details for that on the next post :). Before I leave you guys, I do have one more thing to pass on, I think this is also a very important thing to understand, once you guys get into the industry (With more luck then me :)). When you are given your shot to animate, remember to look at how much time they will give you and plan your time accordingly, it won't always go to plan of course, set time stages in between the time you have, this way you will learn to finish what you need to do and not get carried away in certain stages of your animation, again this is why its important to plan your animation first. The most important thing of all is to animate within the given time, if you have one day to animate a shot, you don't want to start letting your imagination go wild, and think up of crazy things the character will be doing, the times set for shots are always appropriate, if the director gives you a day to do one shot, chances are it won't be a dance shot with 600 characters, it will be a character standing there with maybe a short dialogue, and if that's the case, just animate that, don't make the character start pulling of kung fu moves, so you can prove to the animation director you can animate, remember there is a difference between animating hard and animating smart, you want to be animating smart, especially with a time pressure industry like animation.
So I will leave you guys and gals with that until next time, where I will go over my blocking!
Cheers,
Meng the Hobbit.
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