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...