Things I Have Learned This Term (Through The Most Brutal Teacher: Experience)

1. You're not good enough to NOT use (video) reference.

2. Animating using a layering method makes more sense after rough pose-to-pose blocking. Otherwise, GOOD LUCK getting any kind of flow in your work.

3. Work clean with clarity and purpose.

4. Just sitting down and animating on the computer is not the best way to explore different acting choices. Acting it out (video reference) and thumbnailing is MUCH easier, faster, and better.

5. Don't expect to cram 5 weeks worth of animation in the two nights before your shot is due. PACE yourself.

6. Your shot is only as good as your weakest pose.

7. All-nighters don't work. You'll do slipshod work and you'll eventually burn out, probably sooner than later.

8. If you multi-task, your work will multi-SUCK. Quality comes from focus, not distraction.

"Denial" Acting Test for Class 4 - Advanced Acting

Here's the animation I've spent the last 8 weeks on, but is still only about 60% done, I would say. It's roughly 15 seconds long and is yet another serious piece. I'm drawn to these emotional exchanges, and though I love comedy, I haven't found the right audio clip or idea to go down that road yet. Plus one of my long term goals is to push the medium into deeper dramatic territory...but I digress.

No matter what style of shot that I do, it's most important that I do it well. And I'm still learning my strengths and weaknesses.

As you can see, we were finally allowed to do camera cuts and also introduce a second character. I was more than a little bit nervous, knowing how much work just one full character is, but I felt very invigorated with the chance to tell my story with the camera as well as the movement of the characters. That's realy fun for me, exploring how to tell the same story and even further the story through all the filmic elements.

Anyhow, I went about everything backwards. I didn't do reference til the end (BIG mistake) after I had gone down many acting choice deadend streets and suffered bad pose on top of bad pose. I was really fumbling around, not committing to anything 100%, because I didn't feel it was worth committing to yet... nothing was feeling appropriate.

But I had to show progress. Every week. And it was so frustrating to work on things and feel like I was only going backwards. Not to mention how my chronic procrastination was sending my stress levels and blood pressure to new heights.

Not that this piece is "final" by any stretch of the imagination. I will continue to work on it, but it's interesting to me to see my original thumbnails and how it has evolved. How I have stuck with the general ideas and emotions of my thumbs for the most part, but I've tried to "plus" them along the way. I wish my ideas were a little clearer, a little stronger in that planning stage, but that could have happened had I acted out the stuff and filmed video reference back then instead of waiting til the end. Oh well. Live and learn.

Enough of that though. No more caveats, no more disclaimers. I share this to give you an idea of my learning process though, not to make excuses for myself.

Working to Camera and Other Excuses for Bad Animation

This is something I wrote up back at the end of March and though that specific moment is past, it's not a lesson I want to forget:

So I did something really scary today. The term is over and we're moving onto other things, so I am "free" to sit back and take a look at my sequence of shots and make further improvements.

And as you may or may not have noticed, all of my shots are medium shots (meaning the legs are cut off for the most part). Medium shots can be dangerous, because since you only have a certain section of the body on camera, there is a great temptation to ignore what is going on with any part of the body that isn't being on screen.

That being said, the "scary" thing I did was to create a new camera, pull it way back and lock it off, and playblast my animation from that angle so I could see what was really going on.

We hear over and over to "work to the camera, work to the camera", but when you don't honor what's going on in 3D space, you end up with a lot of physicality that is just dead wrong (not to mention shadows that are going to look really off - all that kind of stuff is noticed, even if it's just on a subconscious level and the audience won't buy your work). You end up moving things that you should have been rotated, rotating things that should have been moved, you make the neck do unnatural things to achieve a position on camera that should have been achieved by using the root of the spine instead, and on and on and on...

Now that's all fine and good if it "looks good on camera", but I've heard horror stories of animators that have worked this way and then the director comes to them after they are well along in their shot and have started polishing and they say, "Ummm, yeah, you're shot is now a full shot instead of a close-up."

It's times like those that having a gun lying around is not a good idea.

But I'm taking all of this in stride. I'm learning right now, I'm exploring options, I'm falling on my face (a lot)... I think I've blown away nearly all of my keys 4 times on this sequence over the course of 8 weeks, starting fresh and re-tackling things from the ground up, working faster each time and strengthening my acting, posing, and timing wherever possible.

I've been thinking a lot about animation ideally being an additive process rather than a substractive process lately.

It's a lot like SALT in cooking!! You can always add more, but it's really hard to take it out once you've dumped a bunch in there.

As beginning animator-wannabes, we tend to put on a lot of frosting only to realize a week down the road that we forgot to add flour to the actual cake...or that we're frosting a cake that is totally burnt that no amount of frosting is going to make taste good.

Now, I'm not going to show you what my shot looks like from afar, because you will take it out of context, but I'm sharing this experience with you because I learned a great lesson in all of this.

Chances are that if you look at your shot from different angles and your physicality only really works to the camera, you've got bad physicality. And conversely, if it reads well in space, you can rest pretty assured that it will be believable no matter where the camera is placed. In that latter case, all you have to do is make sure that your silhouettes are clear, your poses are strong and the action is open enough to camera, but that's just animation commonsense.

After evaluating my animation this way, what it looks like not to camera, I am able to see more objectively and can address problem areas I didn't see before.

So this idea of "cheating" in animation I kind of mistrust. Cheating has to be done to deliberate and appropriate effect, not as a shortcut because you're lazy or can't do it in a naturalistic, anatomically sound way. Learn the rules before you go around breaking them willy-nilly.

You'll only end up cheating yourself...

Animation Is Like A Science Experiment

I've decided that animation is just like a science experiment. Instead of throwing a bunch of ingredients into a test tube and trying to figure out what exactly made it turn green, you have to take it step by step in a logical way.

You want to isolate the variables as much as possible. Take it one step at a time.

Of course with enough time and practice, we may get to the point where we can see a all the ingredients at once and be able to immediately assess what's going on, but that's the difference between a seasoned doctor and a beginning med student (to mix my metaphors...)

I don't know HOW many times i've been trying to fix a move by fiddling with the wrong controller when it was another controller entirely that was causing the problem in the first place.

I understand now that, at least for me, keeping it clean means reducing the variables as much as possible. Start with the big masses and layer on the smaller bits in a way that FITS instead of arbitrarily deciding you want to hit these pre-determined poses that you held so precious in your planning stages.

My latest shot I started doing pose to pose and it proved to be a complete disaster. I'm finding that what I thought I needed in blocking is not working when I go to break the movement down and add more.

How to fix this? Better planning, for one. Not deciding on fun-looking thumbnail poses without acting it out to see if it even works or how it would play out in realtime (instead of comic book, storyboard style).

I think that what happened this last go around was that I wanted to see how good my instinct were without having to rely on reference (they are not that good, I learned). But now I see that thumbnail sketches from my imagination are most useful as a rough layout of ideas - since they are created in such a way that I'm really focusing on how the poses work graphically and spatially.

So, as a result, they end up pretty extreme and exaggerated. But I think the blocking and thumbnails have to be really extreme, to a certain extent at least, in order for my mind's eye to fill in the blanks when you have so few drawings to tell the story.

Something ironic though, was even with as few thumbnails as I did, I still had about TWICE as many poses as I needed! I ended up really paring down the poses to the strongest ones and then working within those poses.

Broad movements are fine when they are appropriate, but as I'm slowly learning, less is more. Intensity isn't always big. And without some stillness and room to breathe, the bigger moments don't mean anything.

That's why you can't spot a snow rabbit in the tundra...

It was just really frustrating to have things seem to work at the beginning stages, and then having them totally NOT work once I got further along. Like the foundation I was building on was wrong.

Have you ever tried building a house and get all the way to sheetrocking the thing and realize you had to rip out all the studs and start over --- 4 times??

But that's just part of paying your dues. Learning by doing. And often doing it wrong -- seeing it doesn't work, figuring out why it's not working, coming up with what you think is the solution, changing things, and trying again. Repeat. Times four, or however many times it takes you.

And that scenario doesn't change in the studios. I've heard really good animators (yeah, even the Pixar ones) say directors change their minds all the time, and you have to be ready to rip it out and start over, on a moment's notice, with an unforgiving deadline, no less.

If this sounds like hell to you, maybe you're not cut out for animation. (Not that you'll avoid this at any other profession - this is just life, baby.)

But if you're somewhat touched in the head, like me, you wouldn't want to be doing anything else...

MIA

I know my blog has been MIA for a while, and for that I apologize. The past three months have been full of both personal and professional change and I'm barely starting to get my head above water.

There is a lot I want to blog about and share, and after this week, I think I will have much more time to reflect and process what has happened, what I have learned, where I want to go from here, and how to go about achieving my goals.

I firmly believe that no experience is wasted if you can learn something from it, so I intend to move forward in that spirit.

So stay tooned....