Andrew Gordon graduated from VanArts, and worked for Pixar over 12 years. He worked on my of the films I loved and share his knowledge on animation techniques, appeal, and process with back to back reviews.
Principles of Animation - The ingredients to make animation believable.
- Squash and Stretch - Gives a feeling that either the object is made out of rubber or stone. You want to be able to hide the squash and stretch when playing your animation, but when you slow it down you will be able to tell where the areas of squash and stretch is being added t give a sense of weight.
- Anticipation - It's the preparation before an action. Typically its the opposite direction before the action. Anticipating before a jump is where the character is squatting and preparing to build power then jump.
- Staging - Setting up the stage so the idea is clear, making sure that your animation is a fit for your camera. And make sure the animation is clear when you review it in silhouette.
- Drag and Follow Thru - Follow thru means the attachments of a body continue to move after the body stops, and the attachments ill follow through and subtle over time. Overlap means the attachments movements will be offset from the main body, not everything has to move all at once. Drag is when the body moves, then the attachments will react to keep up.
- Arcs - Very Important Principle, its natural to move in arcs in space. When you throw a baseball and pay attention to all the joints, you will see that hands, feet, knees, core, nose all moves with arcs.
- Ease in and Ease out - Important for natural movement. Every object needs time to accelerate and slow down. Ease in and out between Extreme poses. Heavy objects take longer to accelerate, Lighter is faster to accelerate to the next pose.
- Exaggeration - Normal ideas / poses are commonly boring. But by pushing the idea / pose, you will be taking a much more interesting approach, for your audience.
- Timing and Spacing - Timing is everything, it's used to help develop the mood of a character, happy, sad, excited, etc. Also, an object's weight determines how a character will interact with it. Like pushing a heavy vs light Box.
- Secondary actions - Secondary idea or gesture the helps support the primary action for the scene. Arms, Hands, Legs, Feet can have a mind of its own to support the main idea.
- Appeal - Its all about making shapes work together, by understanding what makes a good pose. Design and Movement should be appealing to the audience.
- Strait ahead and Pose to Pose - 2 different styles of animating out your scene. Strait ahead means animating frame after frame. Pose to Pose works best for planning out your scene and determine where to address the character's mood. Layering is another style 3d animators use to block out their animation, typically they will animate Bone layers. Root, Core, Arms/Legs, Head, Hands/Feet, Face.
Staging and Pose Design - The art of directing the audience's eyes and feelings.
- Staging is all about the presentation for your scene. You want to be able to control the audience eyes, by using colors, shapes, contrast, and correct camera angles.
- Color gives a visual element to your stage. It can help direct the mood of the scene, red means trouble, yellow means aware, saturated colors represents depression, bright warm colors give a sense of happy.
- Angle shapes can build intensity to your scene. Using a triangle staging, will direct the eye to look at 3 points. For example, having 3 characters talk about an important issue, the talker is the primary point, the reacting character is 2nd point, and the listener is 3rd point.
- When introducing our character, you want to give an awesome first impression. Signify the certain elements that portrays to your character, this will give the audience a taste of your character's design.
- Contrast plays a big role in your scene.. By using (dark vs white), (active vs calm), (big vs small), etc. You can direct the audience's eyes n 1 shot of several shots.
- Staging all your shots correctly and putting it all together, will make your scene Awesome.
Pose Design
Hand Poses
Locomotion
Acting for Animation
Gesture in Animation
Planning
Blocking
Facial Animation
Polish
Demo Reels
Thank you Bioware for giving me the opportunity to attend this class once more.
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