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...