Haircare (clipped to polyvore.com)
david
wtorek, 13 stycznia 2015
Animation Mentor - TipsAndTricks_eBook - 16-20
BLINKS HAVE MEANING
Tip 1: Blinks Have Meaning!
I feel like writing about blinks today. Why? I just saw a commercial on TV (name of product withheld to protect the innocent) starring
a character who had a severe blinking problem.
Now, I don’t mean the character blinked too much. I don’t mean he blinked too fast. I don’t mean the character’s blinks were too far
offset, too slow, or too few.
No, this character was plagued by a disease that has been running rampant through animation (particularly student work, though
not Animation Mentor students, of course. Everything they do is perfect and wonderful in every conceivable way... Well, okay, that’s
not exactly true, but I haven’t actually seen it as a problem in the school. Probably because we harp on stuff like this ad nauseum).
Where was I?
Oh yeah, the disease...
Let’s call it “Randomblinkitis.”
Many animated characters currently living out their lives on demo reels around the world suffer from this terrible disease, causing
their blinks to feel random and meaningless. While some characters use their blinks to convey thought process and emotion, these
poor Randomblinkitis victims are forced to slog through their daily existence unable to properly communicate their emotions and
thoughts to each other, let alone to recruiters around the globe.
It’s a tough life for them, folks, so let’s do something about it!
See, the medicine for this heartbreaking disease is Observation. It’s easy to do, and it’ll mean so much to your animated characters
(and to the recruiters forced to have to try to communicate with your characters!) if you can just take a little time to observe the
blinks of your friends, your family, your co-workers, your favorite movie star, and yourself before you start plowing ahead into acting
scenes.
Listen, I know about the whole “I just discovered animation a month ago and must do an acting scene IMMEDIATELY!” thing. I know
you all want to do acting scenes. I know you think they’re the most fun. I know you think they’re your ticket into Pixar. And I also
know that for some of you, all the “honestly, spending 6 months practicing basic body mechanics and force will give you far stronger
acting scenes than you’ll ever be able to do without that foundation” advice in the world isn’t going to keep you away from playing
with some acting shots...
So, if you absolutely must do some acting shots (or, better yet, are advanced enough to do acting shots properly), then please, give
some attention to the eyes of your character.
We’ve probably all heard people say “90% of acting is in the eyes” or something to that effect. Shoot, some of us have said that
ourselves. And I actually think that’s true, and is great advice (aside from the fact that if you don’t sell the acting with the body first,
all the facial stuff in the world isn’t going to save your scene), but when you hear that “90% of the acting is in the eyes,” I know most
people immediately jump to “eye darts” and “eye direction,” etc., completely skipping over one of the most essential acting tools you
have - the blink.
When I was in school, I was told that “animated characters should always blink every two seconds.”
Well, that’s just about the worst advice I ever got, other than some advice I recently was given during a trip to Singapore, which was
“giant fish eyeballs taste really GREAT,” but animation-wise, I think the “blink every two seconds” is probably the worst. Actually, both
of those pieces of advice are equally true (or rather, equally completely-and-utterly-untrue!).
Look around. Do you see anyone who is blinking every 2 seconds?! (If you do, please report them to your government, because
chances are they are some kind of android spy from Mars or something.) People don’t blink on any kind of set time schedule
anymore than giant fish eyeballs taste “great” (and for all of you out there who maybe think fish eyeballs DO taste great, probably
because you have some kind of steel-reinforced taste buds like the Singaporeans I was with at that restaurant -- which I do admire
and am completely jealous of, by the way-- then that’s fine to like your giant eyeballs, but just trust me on the blink thing anyway,
okay?)
Look - if you do a scene where your character doesn’t blink at all, and don’t have a reason behind it, you have a fair chance of that
character feeling a little dead. However, there are plenty of times when you’d WANT the character to not blink -- maybe he’s scared
out of his mind, or she’s looking longingly into her husband’s eyes, or you’re doing some homage to A Clockwork Orange...
We’ll get into that stuff in a minute - for now, I just want to point out the reasoning behind the “blink every 2 seconds” rule. Ostensibly,
it’s so your character feels alive. That’s the idea they’re shooting for, anyway.
Sadly, this is a very outdated concept. If you choose to animate according to this rule, and have every character blink every 2
seconds, two things will happen:
1) First off - congratulations: no one will wonder if your character is dead, or if his eyes are getting enough moisture. Mission (sort
of) Accomplished.
2) Instead, they’ll be wondering if your characters are meant to be robots. (D’oh!)
Blinks are so much more than the merely physical act of moistening our eyeballs! We blink for a variety of reasons, and the absolute
least important of these reasons to you, as an animator, is the “I’m just getting my eyeballs wet” blink. Forget about that blink. File it
away in your head for future use, I guess, but file it in the back of the bottom drawer, right next to “My Aunt Martha’s right eyebrow
shoots upwards every time she says ‘pretzel’.” It’ll come up about as often in your work, and be about as useful as well.
People blink for a reason.
Blinks are so much more than any kind of physical dry-eye response.
Blinks are the key to selling many emotions. Fire up some of your favorite films and study the eyes of good actors.
When do they blink?
Why?
What does it feel like?
How does it make you feel?
Right off the bat, the number of blinks can affect emotion in dramatic ways. Rapid blinks can make a character feel shy, nervous,
uncomfortable, relieved, or like they are about to cry. Not blinking at all can feel angry, stoned, dead, or super intense.
Check out Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump when he’s meeting his son for the first time. As soon as he realizes it’s his son, he stops
blinking completely. He’s transfixed. Tom Hanks holds back his blinks to communicate the idea that his character is THAT intense
about what he’s realizing. Then a blink, and boom - he’s on to his next emotion, which is guilt. He feels guilty. Shouldn’t he have been
there to raise his son? Did he do something wrong? The blinks are coming fast and furious now, to indicate his discomfort, his worry.
Then a thought occurs to him: “is he slow, like me?” He doesn’t say it right away, but you can feel the exact moment that crosses his
mind, because suddenly his blinks stop again, and he’s back to that intensity, and finally he works up the courage to ask Jenny his
big question: “is he smart, or is he...?” Huge eyes, locked on, almost afraid to hear the answer. “He’s the smartest in his class.” And the
blinks are fired back up again, which communicates his relief.
That whole scene is amazing for eye stuff. He even asks “can I go see him?” using only his eyes! Sure, his head moves barely as well,
but it’s 90% just his eyes, and you totally know exactly what he’s saying. He delivers a line without ever opening his mouth. And it
feels so real. To me, that’s a great scene, and something we should all aspire to in our work.
So your first set of big blink questions is this: “what’s my character’s emotional state right now? What are they reacting to? How is
that making them feel?” And your second set of questions, just as important (if not more so) is this: “well, how do I blink when I feel
that way? How do my friends blink when they’re in that situation? How did my favorite actor blink in that amazing scene I saw the
other day?”
Figure out the emotional state of your character, go observe that emotional state in as true a form as you possible can, and then
study the heck out of those eyelids. Better yet, act the scene out over and over and over until you aren’t thinking at all about what
the actual dialogue lines are anymore, and all you’re thinking about is the emotion you are truly making yourself feel, and the
context/subtext of the scene, and videotape it, and study it!
That’s it. It’s pretty simple really. Just like with every single conceivable aspect of your animation, you don’t do ANYTHING without
a reason. You don’t move a single finger without knowing why your character is moving it, and the eyes (and sometimes even more
importantly, the blinks) are no exceptions. Never move ANYTHING on a character unless you know exactly why you’re moving it. So
if anyone ever tells you to animate something randomly, unless it’s the tiniest subtle “add a little ‘dirt’ to this movement so it feels
a little less smooth” type of thing, then you should probably say, “No way!” Unless he’s your animation director. Then you probably
shouldn’t say, “No way.” That might be a really bad idea. You should instead say “Right away, no problem!” while you silently think
“man, I wish my animation director would take some AnimationMentor classes...”
Where was I? Oh yeah - nothing is random. Well, neither are blinks.
The most important use of a blink is to show thought process. We do blink sometimes just to wet our eyes, and we blink on a rapid
head turn, we blink on a major change in eye direction, and all those other “blink rules,” but in my opinion the most important time is
when we have a change in our thought process. When we’re having an idea, or when we’re switching from one emotion to another,
or when we’re realizing something. Those are the gold-mines in terms of blinks - that’s when a perfectly placed blink will take a scene
from being merely “good” and make it “great.”
There’s a great book called “In the Blink of An Eye,” by Walter Murch, who is an amazing film editor. Murch is an incredibly accomplished
film and sound editor, with a bunch of Oscars on his mantle, and great work in such films as Apocalypse Now, The Godfather Part II,
The English Patient, and The Talented Mr. Ripley. Part of that book is about his theory that we blink to edit the film of our lives. We
blink throughout the day to cut from one scene to the next to the next to the next. And he uses that theory in his film editing. He
looks for when the main character blinks, and often uses that as his cutting point, figuring that it’s probably the most natural-feeling
place to cut for the audience.
As animators, we can hijack his theory and apply it to our own work and our acting. We can study the same phenomenon that he
noticed, and we will all find the same exact result - people blink when their brain shifts from one thing to another, whether it’s an
emotion or a thought.
We blink for a bunch of reasons, but the most important to me are these:
1. We blink when we shift our thought process
2. We blink to show or hide emotion
3. We blink in the middle of a fast head turn
For me, those three things dictate 99.9999% of the blinks I’ve ever animated, and I’ll tell you what - not one of them has anything to
do with any “2 Second” rule.
Ok, so let’s start with number 3, since that’s the most basic. This is one that most of you have heard about, and use often. Personally,
I think it’s a great rule, and seems to work really well. If your character’s head does a really fast head-turn, drop a blink in there near
the middle or near the end of the head turn, and it’ll give it a nice natural feel. This is something I’ve definitely observed in people,
and it’s a great rule of thumb to generally keep in mind.
I’m not sure why we blink mid-turn, but I think it might have something to do with having too much visual information zooming
past our eyes, and our brain says, “Holy moly! Too much information! Gotta shut those things for a moment!” I have no idea if that’s
true, but it sounds like it might be right, and that’s good enough for me...
Let’s jump back up to good old numero uno - blinking to show a shift in our thought process.
This is an absolutely essential and endlessly useful tool in animation - something you can truly use over and over again, in shot after
shot. Like the idea of advanced “anticipation,” this really can be one of those few “lifelines” of communication you can have with your
audience. A way to reach out to them, and whisper, “Hey, check it out! He’s thinking right now! Oooh! And now he’s made up his
mind!”
Anyway - back to shifting our though processes...
The eyes are the windows to the soul, right? We’ve talked about that cliche, and how right it is, and how important it is to communicate
with your character’s eyes. (I think we have, anyway. Haven’t we? This is month 19, so it’s getting a little fuzzy in my memory! I could
look it up, but we both know I’m too lazy to do that...)
Personally, I feel like 70-80% of the emotion of your character is going to be sold in the face, and 90% of THAT emotion will be sold
in the eyes. The timing and direction of your eye darts will communicate more than almost any other thing in your scene.
But a HUGE part of that communication is with eye blinks. We can talk more about eyes later, if you guys want, but as far as blinks
go, all the great eye animation in the world will not work without carefully planned blinks.
Your character is in a basement. Scared. Backing into a dark corner, unsure of where the villain is hiding. His eyes are wide, darting
all over the place, searching frantically. For help. For a way out. For a weapon. For a hiding place.
So far, so good. No reason to blink, right? He’s scared for his life, searching DESPERATELY for help. His eyes want to suck in as much
information as humanly possible, because if they don’t figure something out quick, his eyes might stop seeing anything at all pretty
soon.
If you’re animating this scene, you’re going to be taking the “no blinks at all” approach so far in this scene, unless it’s gone on for
a REALLY long time. If the eyes are desperate enough, I think you could get away with not blinking for even 10 seconds or more.
There are countless scenes of some of our best actors showing their intensity and emotion by not blinking for much longer than 10
seconds, but at some point, a sustained shot of “scared guy” is going to get stale and boring, so I’d say a shot like this will get boring
long before you’d HAVE to throw a blink in there...
So, he’s scared and desperate. No blinks yet. His back bumps against concrete, and he realizes he is cornered. His eyes are even wider.
Searching. Hoping. Suddenly, they lock on! He spies a shovel! A weapon! He’s found hope!
Guess what he does?
He grabs the shovel, right? Well, yeah, he does, but what does he do first?
He blinks.
Why? Well, it’s sort of the Walter Murch thing. He’s “cutting” his film. His “scared and hopeless” scene has ended, and it’s time for the
“try to be a hero” scene, starring him and his shovel.
In other words, his thought-process has shifted. He’s gone from one idea to another idea, in his head. He was scared out of his mind,
and now his fright has morphed a little bit. It’s evolved. He’s probably still scared, but I bet his eyes are a little narrower, now that he
has his shovel in hand. His eyes are darting a lot less. He’s still frightened, but now he’s a little hopeful, and maybe even a little mad.
Who is this lunatic hunting him down in his basement?! Who does he think he is!? He’s going to get a face full of shovel if he doesn’t
get out right now!
Right?
When you first get handed a scene like this, you’re going to study the amount of time you have to work with, you’re going to plan out
your motions and timing, figure out your dynamic poses, etc. Just as with any other bit of planning, it’s essential to search through
your scene and try to find a moment of change – when an emotion changes, or an idea shifts. These are ALWAYS the meatiest
moments for you as an actor and animator, and these are generally the moments when you will carefully choose when to blink.
A shift from scared to hopeful? Blink. Happy to nervous? Blink. How about something really subtle, like sad to sadder. Blink!
Those blinks will SELL the changes in thought process more than anything else other than possibly overall posture changes.
Ok, and then lastly, we have the idea of using blinks to sell emotions.
Well, let’s go back to our previous example, with the scared basement guy. How do we know he’s scared? Well, hopefully you’re using
as many small things as possible to show his fear. Hopefully his movements feel afraid, his head and eyes are darting around, his
overall actions and broad movements can even show fear.
But having those wide, unblinking freaked out eyes - THOSE are going to sell the fear as much as anything else. Maybe even more
than anything else, right? So right off the bat, we have an emotion being sold through blinks, or rather, through the lack of blinks.
What would it look like if he was blinking a lot in the basement? He’d look flustered, maybe he’d look like he’s thinking rapidly about
a lot of different ideas, or trying to remember something. He might look shy, or maybe even nervous. But he probably wouldn’t look
scared, no matter WHAT you did with the rest of him.
Once Mr. Scared finds his shovel, he blinks to show that realization (and the timing and number of blinks at this point, by the way,
will totally define the mood of the performance. A long pause, with two wide-eyed blinks would be funny and played for comedy,
whereas a quick blink and dash for the shovel will keep it in the “scary” realm), but now that he has his shovel, we’re going to use our
blinks in a whole new way.
He’s still scared, but not so desperate that he can’t blink now and then. Now we’ll have quick “scared” blinks (slower blinks would feel
too laid back) now and then, maybe when he’s shifting his gaze from one place to another, or if he hears a sound in the other corner
of the basement, etc.
The timing and number of your blinks are an invaluable way of letting your audience know what’s going on in your character’s head.
Not only how he’s feeling, but when those feelings are changing.
To me, this concept is one of the most fundamental foundations of any good acting performance, and I think it’s something
worthwhile for us all to continue to study and deconstruct.
If you’ve been reading this column since the beginning, you’ve read my tips about scene planning and know how essential it is to
plan your performances. Part of that planning should often be video reference, of either yourself or friends or actors. If you truly get
into your character’s head, and truly begin to feel the REAL emotions of the scene when you are acting out your video reference, you
WILL see the properly placed blinks, showing these shifts in emotion and thought process. If you aren’t sure where to blink, be sure
to go through this process, it can be really helpful.
Another great idea is to just study the blinks of your favorite actors. Think of your favorite film, and choose a scene that stood out
to you as being especially believable acting. Pull it up on DVD and study the actor’s blinks. Check out Forrest Gump meeting his
son for the first time - it’s amazing. Also, Robin Williams’ blinks and eye-darts in One Hour Photo are great to analyze. Any of your
favorite actors will have valuable reference for you to study. Check that stuff out! How does the timing and frequency of the blinks
communicate the emotion at just the right precise moment to make it feel true... How does it make you feel? Why?
It’s a great idea to sit down and really study that stuff. Make notes for yourself, and really dig into it. You don’t have to be an acting
Tip 1: Blinks Have Meaning!
I feel like writing about blinks today. Why? I just saw a commercial on TV (name of product withheld to protect the innocent) starring
a character who had a severe blinking problem.
Now, I don’t mean the character blinked too much. I don’t mean he blinked too fast. I don’t mean the character’s blinks were too far
offset, too slow, or too few.
No, this character was plagued by a disease that has been running rampant through animation (particularly student work, though
not Animation Mentor students, of course. Everything they do is perfect and wonderful in every conceivable way... Well, okay, that’s
not exactly true, but I haven’t actually seen it as a problem in the school. Probably because we harp on stuff like this ad nauseum).
Where was I?
Oh yeah, the disease...
Let’s call it “Randomblinkitis.”
Many animated characters currently living out their lives on demo reels around the world suffer from this terrible disease, causing
their blinks to feel random and meaningless. While some characters use their blinks to convey thought process and emotion, these
poor Randomblinkitis victims are forced to slog through their daily existence unable to properly communicate their emotions and
thoughts to each other, let alone to recruiters around the globe.
It’s a tough life for them, folks, so let’s do something about it!
See, the medicine for this heartbreaking disease is Observation. It’s easy to do, and it’ll mean so much to your animated characters
(and to the recruiters forced to have to try to communicate with your characters!) if you can just take a little time to observe the
blinks of your friends, your family, your co-workers, your favorite movie star, and yourself before you start plowing ahead into acting
scenes.
Listen, I know about the whole “I just discovered animation a month ago and must do an acting scene IMMEDIATELY!” thing. I know
you all want to do acting scenes. I know you think they’re the most fun. I know you think they’re your ticket into Pixar. And I also
know that for some of you, all the “honestly, spending 6 months practicing basic body mechanics and force will give you far stronger
acting scenes than you’ll ever be able to do without that foundation” advice in the world isn’t going to keep you away from playing
with some acting shots...
So, if you absolutely must do some acting shots (or, better yet, are advanced enough to do acting shots properly), then please, give
some attention to the eyes of your character.
We’ve probably all heard people say “90% of acting is in the eyes” or something to that effect. Shoot, some of us have said that
ourselves. And I actually think that’s true, and is great advice (aside from the fact that if you don’t sell the acting with the body first,
all the facial stuff in the world isn’t going to save your scene), but when you hear that “90% of the acting is in the eyes,” I know most
people immediately jump to “eye darts” and “eye direction,” etc., completely skipping over one of the most essential acting tools you
have - the blink.
When I was in school, I was told that “animated characters should always blink every two seconds.”
Well, that’s just about the worst advice I ever got, other than some advice I recently was given during a trip to Singapore, which was
“giant fish eyeballs taste really GREAT,” but animation-wise, I think the “blink every two seconds” is probably the worst. Actually, both
of those pieces of advice are equally true (or rather, equally completely-and-utterly-untrue!).
Look around. Do you see anyone who is blinking every 2 seconds?! (If you do, please report them to your government, because
chances are they are some kind of android spy from Mars or something.) People don’t blink on any kind of set time schedule
anymore than giant fish eyeballs taste “great” (and for all of you out there who maybe think fish eyeballs DO taste great, probably
because you have some kind of steel-reinforced taste buds like the Singaporeans I was with at that restaurant -- which I do admire
and am completely jealous of, by the way-- then that’s fine to like your giant eyeballs, but just trust me on the blink thing anyway,
okay?)
Look - if you do a scene where your character doesn’t blink at all, and don’t have a reason behind it, you have a fair chance of that
character feeling a little dead. However, there are plenty of times when you’d WANT the character to not blink -- maybe he’s scared
out of his mind, or she’s looking longingly into her husband’s eyes, or you’re doing some homage to A Clockwork Orange...
We’ll get into that stuff in a minute - for now, I just want to point out the reasoning behind the “blink every 2 seconds” rule. Ostensibly,
it’s so your character feels alive. That’s the idea they’re shooting for, anyway.
Sadly, this is a very outdated concept. If you choose to animate according to this rule, and have every character blink every 2
seconds, two things will happen:
1) First off - congratulations: no one will wonder if your character is dead, or if his eyes are getting enough moisture. Mission (sort
of) Accomplished.
2) Instead, they’ll be wondering if your characters are meant to be robots. (D’oh!)
Blinks are so much more than the merely physical act of moistening our eyeballs! We blink for a variety of reasons, and the absolute
least important of these reasons to you, as an animator, is the “I’m just getting my eyeballs wet” blink. Forget about that blink. File it
away in your head for future use, I guess, but file it in the back of the bottom drawer, right next to “My Aunt Martha’s right eyebrow
shoots upwards every time she says ‘pretzel’.” It’ll come up about as often in your work, and be about as useful as well.
People blink for a reason.
Blinks are so much more than any kind of physical dry-eye response.
Blinks are the key to selling many emotions. Fire up some of your favorite films and study the eyes of good actors.
When do they blink?
Why?
What does it feel like?
How does it make you feel?
Right off the bat, the number of blinks can affect emotion in dramatic ways. Rapid blinks can make a character feel shy, nervous,
uncomfortable, relieved, or like they are about to cry. Not blinking at all can feel angry, stoned, dead, or super intense.
Check out Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump when he’s meeting his son for the first time. As soon as he realizes it’s his son, he stops
blinking completely. He’s transfixed. Tom Hanks holds back his blinks to communicate the idea that his character is THAT intense
about what he’s realizing. Then a blink, and boom - he’s on to his next emotion, which is guilt. He feels guilty. Shouldn’t he have been
there to raise his son? Did he do something wrong? The blinks are coming fast and furious now, to indicate his discomfort, his worry.
Then a thought occurs to him: “is he slow, like me?” He doesn’t say it right away, but you can feel the exact moment that crosses his
mind, because suddenly his blinks stop again, and he’s back to that intensity, and finally he works up the courage to ask Jenny his
big question: “is he smart, or is he...?” Huge eyes, locked on, almost afraid to hear the answer. “He’s the smartest in his class.” And the
blinks are fired back up again, which communicates his relief.
That whole scene is amazing for eye stuff. He even asks “can I go see him?” using only his eyes! Sure, his head moves barely as well,
but it’s 90% just his eyes, and you totally know exactly what he’s saying. He delivers a line without ever opening his mouth. And it
feels so real. To me, that’s a great scene, and something we should all aspire to in our work.
So your first set of big blink questions is this: “what’s my character’s emotional state right now? What are they reacting to? How is
that making them feel?” And your second set of questions, just as important (if not more so) is this: “well, how do I blink when I feel
that way? How do my friends blink when they’re in that situation? How did my favorite actor blink in that amazing scene I saw the
other day?”
Figure out the emotional state of your character, go observe that emotional state in as true a form as you possible can, and then
study the heck out of those eyelids. Better yet, act the scene out over and over and over until you aren’t thinking at all about what
the actual dialogue lines are anymore, and all you’re thinking about is the emotion you are truly making yourself feel, and the
context/subtext of the scene, and videotape it, and study it!
That’s it. It’s pretty simple really. Just like with every single conceivable aspect of your animation, you don’t do ANYTHING without
a reason. You don’t move a single finger without knowing why your character is moving it, and the eyes (and sometimes even more
importantly, the blinks) are no exceptions. Never move ANYTHING on a character unless you know exactly why you’re moving it. So
if anyone ever tells you to animate something randomly, unless it’s the tiniest subtle “add a little ‘dirt’ to this movement so it feels
a little less smooth” type of thing, then you should probably say, “No way!” Unless he’s your animation director. Then you probably
shouldn’t say, “No way.” That might be a really bad idea. You should instead say “Right away, no problem!” while you silently think
“man, I wish my animation director would take some AnimationMentor classes...”
Where was I? Oh yeah - nothing is random. Well, neither are blinks.
The most important use of a blink is to show thought process. We do blink sometimes just to wet our eyes, and we blink on a rapid
head turn, we blink on a major change in eye direction, and all those other “blink rules,” but in my opinion the most important time is
when we have a change in our thought process. When we’re having an idea, or when we’re switching from one emotion to another,
or when we’re realizing something. Those are the gold-mines in terms of blinks - that’s when a perfectly placed blink will take a scene
from being merely “good” and make it “great.”
There’s a great book called “In the Blink of An Eye,” by Walter Murch, who is an amazing film editor. Murch is an incredibly accomplished
film and sound editor, with a bunch of Oscars on his mantle, and great work in such films as Apocalypse Now, The Godfather Part II,
The English Patient, and The Talented Mr. Ripley. Part of that book is about his theory that we blink to edit the film of our lives. We
blink throughout the day to cut from one scene to the next to the next to the next. And he uses that theory in his film editing. He
looks for when the main character blinks, and often uses that as his cutting point, figuring that it’s probably the most natural-feeling
place to cut for the audience.
As animators, we can hijack his theory and apply it to our own work and our acting. We can study the same phenomenon that he
noticed, and we will all find the same exact result - people blink when their brain shifts from one thing to another, whether it’s an
emotion or a thought.
We blink for a bunch of reasons, but the most important to me are these:
1. We blink when we shift our thought process
2. We blink to show or hide emotion
3. We blink in the middle of a fast head turn
For me, those three things dictate 99.9999% of the blinks I’ve ever animated, and I’ll tell you what - not one of them has anything to
do with any “2 Second” rule.
Ok, so let’s start with number 3, since that’s the most basic. This is one that most of you have heard about, and use often. Personally,
I think it’s a great rule, and seems to work really well. If your character’s head does a really fast head-turn, drop a blink in there near
the middle or near the end of the head turn, and it’ll give it a nice natural feel. This is something I’ve definitely observed in people,
and it’s a great rule of thumb to generally keep in mind.
I’m not sure why we blink mid-turn, but I think it might have something to do with having too much visual information zooming
past our eyes, and our brain says, “Holy moly! Too much information! Gotta shut those things for a moment!” I have no idea if that’s
true, but it sounds like it might be right, and that’s good enough for me...
Let’s jump back up to good old numero uno - blinking to show a shift in our thought process.
This is an absolutely essential and endlessly useful tool in animation - something you can truly use over and over again, in shot after
shot. Like the idea of advanced “anticipation,” this really can be one of those few “lifelines” of communication you can have with your
audience. A way to reach out to them, and whisper, “Hey, check it out! He’s thinking right now! Oooh! And now he’s made up his
mind!”
Anyway - back to shifting our though processes...
The eyes are the windows to the soul, right? We’ve talked about that cliche, and how right it is, and how important it is to communicate
with your character’s eyes. (I think we have, anyway. Haven’t we? This is month 19, so it’s getting a little fuzzy in my memory! I could
look it up, but we both know I’m too lazy to do that...)
Personally, I feel like 70-80% of the emotion of your character is going to be sold in the face, and 90% of THAT emotion will be sold
in the eyes. The timing and direction of your eye darts will communicate more than almost any other thing in your scene.
But a HUGE part of that communication is with eye blinks. We can talk more about eyes later, if you guys want, but as far as blinks
go, all the great eye animation in the world will not work without carefully planned blinks.
Your character is in a basement. Scared. Backing into a dark corner, unsure of where the villain is hiding. His eyes are wide, darting
all over the place, searching frantically. For help. For a way out. For a weapon. For a hiding place.
So far, so good. No reason to blink, right? He’s scared for his life, searching DESPERATELY for help. His eyes want to suck in as much
information as humanly possible, because if they don’t figure something out quick, his eyes might stop seeing anything at all pretty
soon.
If you’re animating this scene, you’re going to be taking the “no blinks at all” approach so far in this scene, unless it’s gone on for
a REALLY long time. If the eyes are desperate enough, I think you could get away with not blinking for even 10 seconds or more.
There are countless scenes of some of our best actors showing their intensity and emotion by not blinking for much longer than 10
seconds, but at some point, a sustained shot of “scared guy” is going to get stale and boring, so I’d say a shot like this will get boring
long before you’d HAVE to throw a blink in there...
So, he’s scared and desperate. No blinks yet. His back bumps against concrete, and he realizes he is cornered. His eyes are even wider.
Searching. Hoping. Suddenly, they lock on! He spies a shovel! A weapon! He’s found hope!
Guess what he does?
He grabs the shovel, right? Well, yeah, he does, but what does he do first?
He blinks.
Why? Well, it’s sort of the Walter Murch thing. He’s “cutting” his film. His “scared and hopeless” scene has ended, and it’s time for the
“try to be a hero” scene, starring him and his shovel.
In other words, his thought-process has shifted. He’s gone from one idea to another idea, in his head. He was scared out of his mind,
and now his fright has morphed a little bit. It’s evolved. He’s probably still scared, but I bet his eyes are a little narrower, now that he
has his shovel in hand. His eyes are darting a lot less. He’s still frightened, but now he’s a little hopeful, and maybe even a little mad.
Who is this lunatic hunting him down in his basement?! Who does he think he is!? He’s going to get a face full of shovel if he doesn’t
get out right now!
Right?
When you first get handed a scene like this, you’re going to study the amount of time you have to work with, you’re going to plan out
your motions and timing, figure out your dynamic poses, etc. Just as with any other bit of planning, it’s essential to search through
your scene and try to find a moment of change – when an emotion changes, or an idea shifts. These are ALWAYS the meatiest
moments for you as an actor and animator, and these are generally the moments when you will carefully choose when to blink.
A shift from scared to hopeful? Blink. Happy to nervous? Blink. How about something really subtle, like sad to sadder. Blink!
Those blinks will SELL the changes in thought process more than anything else other than possibly overall posture changes.
Ok, and then lastly, we have the idea of using blinks to sell emotions.
Well, let’s go back to our previous example, with the scared basement guy. How do we know he’s scared? Well, hopefully you’re using
as many small things as possible to show his fear. Hopefully his movements feel afraid, his head and eyes are darting around, his
overall actions and broad movements can even show fear.
But having those wide, unblinking freaked out eyes - THOSE are going to sell the fear as much as anything else. Maybe even more
than anything else, right? So right off the bat, we have an emotion being sold through blinks, or rather, through the lack of blinks.
What would it look like if he was blinking a lot in the basement? He’d look flustered, maybe he’d look like he’s thinking rapidly about
a lot of different ideas, or trying to remember something. He might look shy, or maybe even nervous. But he probably wouldn’t look
scared, no matter WHAT you did with the rest of him.
Once Mr. Scared finds his shovel, he blinks to show that realization (and the timing and number of blinks at this point, by the way,
will totally define the mood of the performance. A long pause, with two wide-eyed blinks would be funny and played for comedy,
whereas a quick blink and dash for the shovel will keep it in the “scary” realm), but now that he has his shovel, we’re going to use our
blinks in a whole new way.
He’s still scared, but not so desperate that he can’t blink now and then. Now we’ll have quick “scared” blinks (slower blinks would feel
too laid back) now and then, maybe when he’s shifting his gaze from one place to another, or if he hears a sound in the other corner
of the basement, etc.
The timing and number of your blinks are an invaluable way of letting your audience know what’s going on in your character’s head.
Not only how he’s feeling, but when those feelings are changing.
To me, this concept is one of the most fundamental foundations of any good acting performance, and I think it’s something
worthwhile for us all to continue to study and deconstruct.
If you’ve been reading this column since the beginning, you’ve read my tips about scene planning and know how essential it is to
plan your performances. Part of that planning should often be video reference, of either yourself or friends or actors. If you truly get
into your character’s head, and truly begin to feel the REAL emotions of the scene when you are acting out your video reference, you
WILL see the properly placed blinks, showing these shifts in emotion and thought process. If you aren’t sure where to blink, be sure
to go through this process, it can be really helpful.
Another great idea is to just study the blinks of your favorite actors. Think of your favorite film, and choose a scene that stood out
to you as being especially believable acting. Pull it up on DVD and study the actor’s blinks. Check out Forrest Gump meeting his
son for the first time - it’s amazing. Also, Robin Williams’ blinks and eye-darts in One Hour Photo are great to analyze. Any of your
favorite actors will have valuable reference for you to study. Check that stuff out! How does the timing and frequency of the blinks
communicate the emotion at just the right precise moment to make it feel true... How does it make you feel? Why?
It’s a great idea to sit down and really study that stuff. Make notes for yourself, and really dig into it. You don’t have to be an acting
Animation Mentor - TipsAndTricks_eBook - 10-15
PLANNING
Because this is the first article, I’d be remiss if I didn’t start with probably the single most important tip most professional animators
are likely to give a student: PLAN YOUR WORK. Planning is probably the step most often missed by students, and at the same time,
it is probably the most essential tool in your entire animation toolbox, especially in the first few years of your animation life. You
should never sit down in front of your computer, animation disc or puppet, until you know exactly what poses you are planning to
use, when you are planning to use them, and why.
Before you begin any shot, it’s so important to study references, work out your thumbnails, and make your timing and acting
decisions on paper. This may seem like an “extra” step to some of you, but believe me, it will save you time in the long run and your
work will look so much stronger than it would have otherwise.
All of my best feature film shots are also the ones I spent the most time planning out. The shots where I got cocky and thought “Aw,
I know how to animate that, I’ll just sit down and do it” are, almost without exception, the shots that ended up being “okay,” but
never as good as they could have been. I’ll always regret missing the opportunity I had to make those shots special, but at least they
taught me an invaluable lesson: Planning Comes First, ALWAYS!
Tune in next time for some practical tips on how you can plan your shot!
OBSERVATION
Okay, so last month I was going on and on about how important it is to spend time planning your scene before you sit down in front
of your computer, your animation disc, or your stop-motion set. But HOW do you do that? What’s the best way to plan a scene?
Well, the first thing you absolutely have to do is OBSERVE.
Sounds simple, right? Well, it isn’t quite as simple as you might first think, but it will become second nature eventually. The important
thing to realize is that observation is not passive or casual. Observation is much more than simply “seeing” something interesting -
it’s ACTIVELY studying the world around us. Sure, a certain amount of curiosity is natural, but you have to take your natural curiosity
for noticing things and train yourself to crank that curiosity knob to 11 if you want to become an animator.
Let’s say that you see a little girl trying to feed her lollypop to a monkey at the zoo, and her mother grabs to stop her, knocking the
lollypop into the air where it sticks in the mother’s hair. Seeing that happen might have been funny, or maybe you felt bad for the
mother, or embarrassed for them -- either way it was probably pretty memorable. It’s something you might even tell your friends
about that night.
However, simply remembering and relating that overall story is not observation. An animator would notice SO MUCH MORE in that
moment than the mere fact that the lollypop got stuck in the woman’s hair. An animator will see the overlap on the girl’s hand as
the mother smacks the lollypop into the air. An animator will see the frightened expression on the girl’s face, or the way the monkey
reacted to the whole thing, or the frozen moment in time when the lolly landed in Mom’s hair and they both just freeze for an instant
as they realize their situation. The way Mom’s shoulders might slump with resignation, or maybe how the little girl tried not to laugh,
or maybe it’s even the way that their dresses spun in the wind as Mom picked up her daughter and hustled off to cut her hair in the
bathroom.
That’s observation, and it’s the single biggest animation tool you will ever have. Any time you see something interesting - be it the
bounce of a squirrel, the flutter of a feather, or the twitch of an about-to-cry eyelid - file those things away in a little filing cabinet in
your head. You never know what you will find helpful down the road, and the bigger library of observations you can build in your
head, the better equipped you will be to deal with any scene a director might throw at you. Not only that, but you’ll be able to come
up with scenes and actions that are not cliché and that feel real and ring true to an audience - and the reason the audience will
identify with the action or emotion you animate is because it’s something you’ve seen in your past, or in a film, or on TV, or even in
a mirror.
All strong animation starts with observation, so train yourself to do more than passively notice the world around you. Soak it up, file
it away, and start using the amazing things around you in your art! Your work will only become stronger and less cliché the more you
allow yourself to truly study the motions, actions, reactions, and emotions of those around you.
Next month we’ll tackle reference! In the meantime, if you want a fun observational exercise, hit a zoo or a park or a shopping mall
and just sit on a bench and watch people. You can even bring along a sketchbook to draw what you see and take notes, but the
important thing is to watch the people around you and truly study them.
Oh, and don’t forget to wear sunglasses so you don’t creep them out!
REFERENCE MATERIALS
We've been talking so far about the importance of planning. Last month we covered the importance of observation, but this week
we're going to get a little more practical and tackle the concept of reference materials.
There are many types of reference materials that will be invaluable to you as an animator. Photography, comic-books, live-action
movie reference, animated reference, and footage of yourself and your friends acting out a scene will all be incredibly useful as you
sit down to plan your shot. It might be the most practical and useful planning of all, in fact.
One misconception that I often hear from students is that "using reference is cheating." Well, if using reference is cheating, then
99% of the world's top animators are cheaters! Nothing could be further from the truth. Using reference is essential, especially for
animation students, to finding the most believable and unique performance for your scene.
First, let's talk about some of my favorite reference photography for a second. Eadweard Muybridge's books can be a big help,
especially when learning about walk cycles and run cycles - both for humans and animals. My favorite, however, is the work of Dr.
Harold Edgerton. His book "Stopping Time" is incredible, and documents his work as he pioneers incredibly fast flash photography,
which allowed him to capture something at speeds upwards of 100,000th of a second. At these speeds, you can really truly see how
the principles of animation exist, even on a very subtle level, in real-world situations where you might have imagined they wouldn't
apply. Check out the squash and stretch on a golf-ball, or the way a baseball bat slightly bends as it whips around -- pretty incredible
stuff to examine. We use both Muybridge and Edgerton's work in our classes at Animation Mentor, and I'd recommend their books
to any animator interested in delving deeper into learning why the principles of animation exist in the first place.
Next up, we have one of the must underrated animation reference resources of all: comic books. If you're interested in learning
about dynamic posing, there is no better place to look than your local comic book shop. Check out some of Jim Lee's recent Batman
work, or J Scott Campbell's "Danger Girl." Comics are (and always have been) underrated in the "art community," but you would do
yourself a disservice by ignoring the work of some of the best comic book artists out there. Many of them come from an animation
background, such as Mike Kunkel, creator of Herobear (awesome!), and you can learn more about line-of-action and dynamic posing
by spending ten minutes in a good comic book than you can by watching hours of movie reference.
Live action and animated reference are next on my list, and these can be some of the most helpful. It's important, in my opinion,
to keep a solid reference library of films if you're going to attack this monster known as "animation." The pile of DVDs on my shelf
at home come in handy on every single show I work on. It's incredibly useful, for example, to be able to pull up some footage
from the olympics to study how someone throws a javelin if you're going to be animating a guy throwing a spear. If you're going
to be animating flying birds, what could possibly be more useful than spending some time studying the documentary "Winged
Migration?"
Finally the most important reference of all - video reference of yourself and your friends. If you have an action shot to work on, set up
a camera and get up and actually DO the action. Over and over and over and over. Do it until it feels natural. Film your friends doing
it. Get as much reference as you can - at least until you know for a fact that you've filmed at least one take that you think would work
well. Then it's up to you to study that take and glean what you can from it.
If you're working on a dialogue shot, that's a whole other ball of wax and can easily involve much more pre-planning as you attempt
to truly get into the character's head, getting to know your character's motivations, back-story, emotional state, etc. That's a whole
other ball of wax that we'll tackle someday down the road - for now, let's stick with this reference stuff.
The important thing here is that with all of these types of reference, you don't just look at them. Don't just look at the photographs.
Don't just flip through the comic book. Don't just watch the movie. STUDY these materials. Find what makes the poses so appealing,
or what maybe even makes a pose confusing or bad. You can learn from good *and* bad reference, so just soak up as much as you
can. If you're animating a bird, and you turn on "Winged Migration" and find the appropriate bird, watch it many times. Watch it in
slow motion. Frame-by-frame. Look at how the wings work, find the key poses that the real bird is actually using. DRAW them in a
sketchbook so that you remember them. Make notes to yourself.
Then when you get back to your desk, start applying the principles of animation to what you've just watched. This is KEY. Do **NOT**
just copy it. Copying reference verbatim generally results in a robotic lifeless feel. Your job as an animator is to take that reference
and apply your ART to it.
Remember - animation is an art. It isn't math. It isn't something where there is a formula that will work 100% of the time. But that
doesn't mean that you can skip over the essential step of planning your scene, and regardless of what the animation style you're
going to work in is, it's always helpful to examine the way that body mechanics and emotions play out in the real world.
Next time we'll talk about thumbnails, and I promise I'll be less wordy. :)
THUMBNAILS
Welcome back!
This month we’re going to talk about thumbnails (and as promised, I’ll be more brief!). So, what are thumbnails? Well, animators
often use the fingernails on their thumbs to animate with. If you use your thumbnails to click your mouse buttons instead of your
forefingers, you get a much better result.
Wow, was that the all-time worst animation joke in the history of animation jokes? I think it must be, though I’d also hazard a guess
that the “history of animation jokes” is probably pretty short.
Okay, so - for real now - what the heck are thumbnails?
Basically, “thumbnail” is a term used to describe a small “thumbnail-sized” drawing that describes a pose, an action, or an idea.
The first rule of thumbnails is, don’t talk about thumbnails.
Jeeeez. I just did it again. Second worst animation joke in the history of animation jokes. Sorry. It won’t happen again, I promise.
Okay, the first rule of thumbnails is: LET THEM BE ROUGH.
They are SUPPOSED to look rough. They are not meant to be pretty pictures. Don’t spend (waste!) a lot of time making each thumbnail
look like a piece of art. Don’t waste time shading it in, drawing all the little details, etc. They’re meant to be fast and sloppy. The entire
point of doing thumbnails is that it saves you time.
How does it save you time? Well, if you do thumbnails as part of your planning process, then you can work through all of your ideas
BEFORE sitting down in front of the computer, and it’s inarguably much faster to doodle a little stick-man doing a pose than it is to
pose him out in the computer.
We use thumbnails to work through our ideas. To get past our first ideas (remember - your first idea is always the worst and most
clichéd idea. The first idea you think of is probably the first and most obvious idea that the audience will think of too!), and get on
to the ideas that count. The later ideas will be the good ones. They’ll be the most inventive ideas, and the most original. But to reach
those ideas, you’ll first have to work through the clichéd ideas, right? Thumbnails are, without a doubt, the fastest way to do that.
The quickest road to a great idea, then, is through thumbnails!
When you get a new scene, sit down and start doodling. Maybe it’s just poses. Maybe it’s working out full actions. Either way,
you’re quickly discovering what will work and what won’t, and it’s all on paper. Quick and dirty - that’s the way to do it. Use a stickman,
even. Many of the best animators do their thumbnails with what is essentially a stick-man. As long as you can see where the
character’s hips are, the angle of the hips, the angle of the shoulders, angle of the head, and the position of the limbs - that’s ALL you
need to know at this point, and you shouldn’t be worrying about any other details yet, generally speaking.
6
Copyright 2008 by AnimationMentor.com. All rights reserved. This ebook may not be reprinted or distributed in electronic, print, web, or other format without
express written permission.
So, the first rule is to stay rough, and the first *use* of thumbnails is to discover the best ideas for your shot.
The second use of thumbnails is to get fast feedback.
You can save yourself days of work (and a great deal of frustration) if you run your thumbnails past your lead or your director before
diving into the actual scene. Nothing is more frustrating than spending 3 days blocking in something that you think is great only
to find out, once the director gets a look at it, that you’re doing something he doesn’t like at all. It’s always a great idea to run your
thumbnails past them first, so you can save yourself the headache (and heartache!) of hearing the dreaded “start over” words from
your director.
The third use of thumbnails is to translate your video reference.
Filming video reference is great, but as we talked about last time, you can’t just coy it or you’re going to end up with a scene that isn’t
as alive as it could have been. Thumbnails are a great way to translate that video reference into poses and timing that are infused
with your knowledge of the art of animation. Sure, you can find some great posing and timing ideas in your video reference, but
that’s only step one. Whip out a sketchbook and start doing little stick-figure drawings of what you are observing (and STUDYING!)
in the reference you’re watching.
But as you draw those thumbnails, you can start to inject the principles of animation into them. Exaggerate the poses, push the lines
of action in the body, and make the poses more dynamic and forceful. You can also jot down timing notes, and maybe you can even
start exaggerating your timing at this stage. Right there in your thumbnails you can be making decisions about timing - give this
part a little more ease-in, make that part a little snappier, etc.
The goal, as far as I’m concerned, is that before you sit down in front of your computer, you have a piece of paper or an exposure
sheet that has dynamic and timed thumbnail poses, so you know exactly what pose will happen on exactly what frames. By the time
you have turned on your computer, every major animation decision should have already been made. Without exception.
If you work this way, I guarantee you will end up with stronger, more dynamic, more communicative, and more memorable scenes
than you would if you just sat down and started saving keys. Even better, I guarantee this entire planning process will save you time
in the long run.
I think, as a general rule, I probably spend about 20% of my time planning. If I have a week to do a shot, I’ll spend the first day
completely away from the computer. A two-week shot might get 2 days of planning. If I only had 2 days to do a shot, then maybe
I’d only spend 2 or 3 hours planning, but I would make the most of those couple hours. I’d spend it studying video reference, filming
myself and my friends, doing thumbnails, etc. I do that because I know without a doubt that by spending that first day planning, I
just saved myself a couple days (or more) worth of “noodling” the shot, and tinkering with it, trying to make it work.
Again, the best scenes I’ve ever done, and the ones I finished the quickest, are the shots that I spent the most time planning.
Over and out.
- Shawn
Because this is the first article, I’d be remiss if I didn’t start with probably the single most important tip most professional animators
are likely to give a student: PLAN YOUR WORK. Planning is probably the step most often missed by students, and at the same time,
it is probably the most essential tool in your entire animation toolbox, especially in the first few years of your animation life. You
should never sit down in front of your computer, animation disc or puppet, until you know exactly what poses you are planning to
use, when you are planning to use them, and why.
Before you begin any shot, it’s so important to study references, work out your thumbnails, and make your timing and acting
decisions on paper. This may seem like an “extra” step to some of you, but believe me, it will save you time in the long run and your
work will look so much stronger than it would have otherwise.
All of my best feature film shots are also the ones I spent the most time planning out. The shots where I got cocky and thought “Aw,
I know how to animate that, I’ll just sit down and do it” are, almost without exception, the shots that ended up being “okay,” but
never as good as they could have been. I’ll always regret missing the opportunity I had to make those shots special, but at least they
taught me an invaluable lesson: Planning Comes First, ALWAYS!
Tune in next time for some practical tips on how you can plan your shot!
OBSERVATION
Okay, so last month I was going on and on about how important it is to spend time planning your scene before you sit down in front
of your computer, your animation disc, or your stop-motion set. But HOW do you do that? What’s the best way to plan a scene?
Well, the first thing you absolutely have to do is OBSERVE.
Sounds simple, right? Well, it isn’t quite as simple as you might first think, but it will become second nature eventually. The important
thing to realize is that observation is not passive or casual. Observation is much more than simply “seeing” something interesting -
it’s ACTIVELY studying the world around us. Sure, a certain amount of curiosity is natural, but you have to take your natural curiosity
for noticing things and train yourself to crank that curiosity knob to 11 if you want to become an animator.
Let’s say that you see a little girl trying to feed her lollypop to a monkey at the zoo, and her mother grabs to stop her, knocking the
lollypop into the air where it sticks in the mother’s hair. Seeing that happen might have been funny, or maybe you felt bad for the
mother, or embarrassed for them -- either way it was probably pretty memorable. It’s something you might even tell your friends
about that night.
However, simply remembering and relating that overall story is not observation. An animator would notice SO MUCH MORE in that
moment than the mere fact that the lollypop got stuck in the woman’s hair. An animator will see the overlap on the girl’s hand as
the mother smacks the lollypop into the air. An animator will see the frightened expression on the girl’s face, or the way the monkey
reacted to the whole thing, or the frozen moment in time when the lolly landed in Mom’s hair and they both just freeze for an instant
as they realize their situation. The way Mom’s shoulders might slump with resignation, or maybe how the little girl tried not to laugh,
or maybe it’s even the way that their dresses spun in the wind as Mom picked up her daughter and hustled off to cut her hair in the
bathroom.
That’s observation, and it’s the single biggest animation tool you will ever have. Any time you see something interesting - be it the
bounce of a squirrel, the flutter of a feather, or the twitch of an about-to-cry eyelid - file those things away in a little filing cabinet in
your head. You never know what you will find helpful down the road, and the bigger library of observations you can build in your
head, the better equipped you will be to deal with any scene a director might throw at you. Not only that, but you’ll be able to come
up with scenes and actions that are not cliché and that feel real and ring true to an audience - and the reason the audience will
identify with the action or emotion you animate is because it’s something you’ve seen in your past, or in a film, or on TV, or even in
a mirror.
All strong animation starts with observation, so train yourself to do more than passively notice the world around you. Soak it up, file
it away, and start using the amazing things around you in your art! Your work will only become stronger and less cliché the more you
allow yourself to truly study the motions, actions, reactions, and emotions of those around you.
Next month we’ll tackle reference! In the meantime, if you want a fun observational exercise, hit a zoo or a park or a shopping mall
and just sit on a bench and watch people. You can even bring along a sketchbook to draw what you see and take notes, but the
important thing is to watch the people around you and truly study them.
Oh, and don’t forget to wear sunglasses so you don’t creep them out!
REFERENCE MATERIALS
We've been talking so far about the importance of planning. Last month we covered the importance of observation, but this week
we're going to get a little more practical and tackle the concept of reference materials.
There are many types of reference materials that will be invaluable to you as an animator. Photography, comic-books, live-action
movie reference, animated reference, and footage of yourself and your friends acting out a scene will all be incredibly useful as you
sit down to plan your shot. It might be the most practical and useful planning of all, in fact.
One misconception that I often hear from students is that "using reference is cheating." Well, if using reference is cheating, then
99% of the world's top animators are cheaters! Nothing could be further from the truth. Using reference is essential, especially for
animation students, to finding the most believable and unique performance for your scene.
First, let's talk about some of my favorite reference photography for a second. Eadweard Muybridge's books can be a big help,
especially when learning about walk cycles and run cycles - both for humans and animals. My favorite, however, is the work of Dr.
Harold Edgerton. His book "Stopping Time" is incredible, and documents his work as he pioneers incredibly fast flash photography,
which allowed him to capture something at speeds upwards of 100,000th of a second. At these speeds, you can really truly see how
the principles of animation exist, even on a very subtle level, in real-world situations where you might have imagined they wouldn't
apply. Check out the squash and stretch on a golf-ball, or the way a baseball bat slightly bends as it whips around -- pretty incredible
stuff to examine. We use both Muybridge and Edgerton's work in our classes at Animation Mentor, and I'd recommend their books
to any animator interested in delving deeper into learning why the principles of animation exist in the first place.
Next up, we have one of the must underrated animation reference resources of all: comic books. If you're interested in learning
about dynamic posing, there is no better place to look than your local comic book shop. Check out some of Jim Lee's recent Batman
work, or J Scott Campbell's "Danger Girl." Comics are (and always have been) underrated in the "art community," but you would do
yourself a disservice by ignoring the work of some of the best comic book artists out there. Many of them come from an animation
background, such as Mike Kunkel, creator of Herobear (awesome!), and you can learn more about line-of-action and dynamic posing
by spending ten minutes in a good comic book than you can by watching hours of movie reference.
Live action and animated reference are next on my list, and these can be some of the most helpful. It's important, in my opinion,
to keep a solid reference library of films if you're going to attack this monster known as "animation." The pile of DVDs on my shelf
at home come in handy on every single show I work on. It's incredibly useful, for example, to be able to pull up some footage
from the olympics to study how someone throws a javelin if you're going to be animating a guy throwing a spear. If you're going
to be animating flying birds, what could possibly be more useful than spending some time studying the documentary "Winged
Migration?"
Finally the most important reference of all - video reference of yourself and your friends. If you have an action shot to work on, set up
a camera and get up and actually DO the action. Over and over and over and over. Do it until it feels natural. Film your friends doing
it. Get as much reference as you can - at least until you know for a fact that you've filmed at least one take that you think would work
well. Then it's up to you to study that take and glean what you can from it.
If you're working on a dialogue shot, that's a whole other ball of wax and can easily involve much more pre-planning as you attempt
to truly get into the character's head, getting to know your character's motivations, back-story, emotional state, etc. That's a whole
other ball of wax that we'll tackle someday down the road - for now, let's stick with this reference stuff.
The important thing here is that with all of these types of reference, you don't just look at them. Don't just look at the photographs.
Don't just flip through the comic book. Don't just watch the movie. STUDY these materials. Find what makes the poses so appealing,
or what maybe even makes a pose confusing or bad. You can learn from good *and* bad reference, so just soak up as much as you
can. If you're animating a bird, and you turn on "Winged Migration" and find the appropriate bird, watch it many times. Watch it in
slow motion. Frame-by-frame. Look at how the wings work, find the key poses that the real bird is actually using. DRAW them in a
sketchbook so that you remember them. Make notes to yourself.
Then when you get back to your desk, start applying the principles of animation to what you've just watched. This is KEY. Do **NOT**
just copy it. Copying reference verbatim generally results in a robotic lifeless feel. Your job as an animator is to take that reference
and apply your ART to it.
Remember - animation is an art. It isn't math. It isn't something where there is a formula that will work 100% of the time. But that
doesn't mean that you can skip over the essential step of planning your scene, and regardless of what the animation style you're
going to work in is, it's always helpful to examine the way that body mechanics and emotions play out in the real world.
Next time we'll talk about thumbnails, and I promise I'll be less wordy. :)
THUMBNAILS
Welcome back!
This month we’re going to talk about thumbnails (and as promised, I’ll be more brief!). So, what are thumbnails? Well, animators
often use the fingernails on their thumbs to animate with. If you use your thumbnails to click your mouse buttons instead of your
forefingers, you get a much better result.
Wow, was that the all-time worst animation joke in the history of animation jokes? I think it must be, though I’d also hazard a guess
that the “history of animation jokes” is probably pretty short.
Okay, so - for real now - what the heck are thumbnails?
Basically, “thumbnail” is a term used to describe a small “thumbnail-sized” drawing that describes a pose, an action, or an idea.
The first rule of thumbnails is, don’t talk about thumbnails.
Jeeeez. I just did it again. Second worst animation joke in the history of animation jokes. Sorry. It won’t happen again, I promise.
Okay, the first rule of thumbnails is: LET THEM BE ROUGH.
They are SUPPOSED to look rough. They are not meant to be pretty pictures. Don’t spend (waste!) a lot of time making each thumbnail
look like a piece of art. Don’t waste time shading it in, drawing all the little details, etc. They’re meant to be fast and sloppy. The entire
point of doing thumbnails is that it saves you time.
How does it save you time? Well, if you do thumbnails as part of your planning process, then you can work through all of your ideas
BEFORE sitting down in front of the computer, and it’s inarguably much faster to doodle a little stick-man doing a pose than it is to
pose him out in the computer.
We use thumbnails to work through our ideas. To get past our first ideas (remember - your first idea is always the worst and most
clichéd idea. The first idea you think of is probably the first and most obvious idea that the audience will think of too!), and get on
to the ideas that count. The later ideas will be the good ones. They’ll be the most inventive ideas, and the most original. But to reach
those ideas, you’ll first have to work through the clichéd ideas, right? Thumbnails are, without a doubt, the fastest way to do that.
The quickest road to a great idea, then, is through thumbnails!
When you get a new scene, sit down and start doodling. Maybe it’s just poses. Maybe it’s working out full actions. Either way,
you’re quickly discovering what will work and what won’t, and it’s all on paper. Quick and dirty - that’s the way to do it. Use a stickman,
even. Many of the best animators do their thumbnails with what is essentially a stick-man. As long as you can see where the
character’s hips are, the angle of the hips, the angle of the shoulders, angle of the head, and the position of the limbs - that’s ALL you
need to know at this point, and you shouldn’t be worrying about any other details yet, generally speaking.
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express written permission.
So, the first rule is to stay rough, and the first *use* of thumbnails is to discover the best ideas for your shot.
The second use of thumbnails is to get fast feedback.
You can save yourself days of work (and a great deal of frustration) if you run your thumbnails past your lead or your director before
diving into the actual scene. Nothing is more frustrating than spending 3 days blocking in something that you think is great only
to find out, once the director gets a look at it, that you’re doing something he doesn’t like at all. It’s always a great idea to run your
thumbnails past them first, so you can save yourself the headache (and heartache!) of hearing the dreaded “start over” words from
your director.
The third use of thumbnails is to translate your video reference.
Filming video reference is great, but as we talked about last time, you can’t just coy it or you’re going to end up with a scene that isn’t
as alive as it could have been. Thumbnails are a great way to translate that video reference into poses and timing that are infused
with your knowledge of the art of animation. Sure, you can find some great posing and timing ideas in your video reference, but
that’s only step one. Whip out a sketchbook and start doing little stick-figure drawings of what you are observing (and STUDYING!)
in the reference you’re watching.
But as you draw those thumbnails, you can start to inject the principles of animation into them. Exaggerate the poses, push the lines
of action in the body, and make the poses more dynamic and forceful. You can also jot down timing notes, and maybe you can even
start exaggerating your timing at this stage. Right there in your thumbnails you can be making decisions about timing - give this
part a little more ease-in, make that part a little snappier, etc.
The goal, as far as I’m concerned, is that before you sit down in front of your computer, you have a piece of paper or an exposure
sheet that has dynamic and timed thumbnail poses, so you know exactly what pose will happen on exactly what frames. By the time
you have turned on your computer, every major animation decision should have already been made. Without exception.
If you work this way, I guarantee you will end up with stronger, more dynamic, more communicative, and more memorable scenes
than you would if you just sat down and started saving keys. Even better, I guarantee this entire planning process will save you time
in the long run.
I think, as a general rule, I probably spend about 20% of my time planning. If I have a week to do a shot, I’ll spend the first day
completely away from the computer. A two-week shot might get 2 days of planning. If I only had 2 days to do a shot, then maybe
I’d only spend 2 or 3 hours planning, but I would make the most of those couple hours. I’d spend it studying video reference, filming
myself and my friends, doing thumbnails, etc. I do that because I know without a doubt that by spending that first day planning, I
just saved myself a couple days (or more) worth of “noodling” the shot, and tinkering with it, trying to make it work.
Again, the best scenes I’ve ever done, and the ones I finished the quickest, are the shots that I spent the most time planning.
Over and out.
- Shawn
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