Study
Ball bounce : in depth
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There is a VERY informative and in-depth breakdown of bouncing balls and what you can learn from them over at the Follow-Thought blog.
Head on over and check it out. It is definitely THE most comprehensive post on what you can learn from a ball bounce that I have ever seen.
|Jacob
Musical Shorts
17
Rece
ntly I was talking to my class about how closely related music and animation are. Both art forms are used to tell stories, convey emotion, and entertain. We even use musical terms like timing, rhythm, phrasing, and beats to describe our motion. Often times I find that the only way to describe some movements in my shots is through sounds. This is something that I’ve always loved about animation.
I’ve also found it very common for animators to be musicians as well. Adam, Jacob, and I have all been very involved in music. Did you know that Adam composed and performs our intro music.
So, with all of this in mind, I asked my student to explore the interwebs and see what kinds of musically driven animated shorts were out there. I propose to throw this same challenge to you our listeners. Go out and find some really inspiring “musical shorts” and post them here in our comments section. We will be posting our favorites as well. They don’t have to be abstract, just drivin by a strong musical foundation. To start things off, here are three of my favorites:
Runaway by Cordell Barker Music by Ben Charest
Sensology by Michel Gagne Music by Paul Plimley and Barry Guy
Thought of You by Ryan Woodward Music by The Weepies
Thought of You from Ryan J Woodward on Vimeo.
Those were great right!? Now post your favorites in the comments section and lets see how much music we can bring to this animation site!!
Acting study: ‘Opulence, I has it.’
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Every once and while commercials come around that are just brilliant. This commercial caught my eye, not only for it’s originality and attention to detail, but also for the acting choices. This is not meant to be anything in depth, but I thought I’d point out some things I thought worked well and what maybe didn’t.
First watch the clip:
The first thing that stuck out to me was how fresh and spot on the acting choices were for our main character. Besides his surroundings and what he’s literally saying, you get so much support about who he is by how he acts and the way he moves.
I’ll just list my favorite parts and what I think they communicate:
- Overall, his movements are slower and more controlled. One of my former acting teachers told me that an easy acting choice to show class is to think that the poor and lowly move very fast and scurry around while the rich and powerful move only a minimal amount since everything is done for them. When he sits back into the chair, notice it’s at his pace. His point towards the bust he prefers lingers there and he only retracts his index finger. Again, all very minimal, but of course, meaningful at the same time.
- His status is also portrayed at the very beginning because he neither looks at the grape he’s about to eat nor does he look back when he hands the bowl away. This shows that he expects everything to be in it’s place and bending to his very will. Again, small choice, but makes a big difference.
- When he chooses the bust he likes best, two things stick out to me. First, he never has to look back at the other bust to compare. Second, the fact that he chooses so quickly. Both of these things show that he knows what he likes and always gets what he wants.
- When he sits down on the couch and turns on the TV his movement is, again, very minimal. Think about how powerful that is and then think about how you would have animated it if you got that line of dialog. I don’t know about you, but I would have over-animated it. I can already think of a couple of head accents and such that I would have added. I would have been wrong. 
- “I jump in it.” is another great example of how we, as animators, would have totally over-animated a piece of dialog. My first reaction to the line would be to maybe add an eyebrow accent, but all he does is a head nod. Just awesome.
-That laugh and reaction to kissing the mini giraffe is priceless. Not only does it cap off the commercial with a fun idea, but it serves a few interesting purposes. First, the most obvious is to show how spoiled he is. He laughs like a kid in a candy store. Second, considering he was pretty minimal throughout the commercial, this adds brilliant contrast. The minimal movement earlier in the commercial serves not only to show his character, but also to accent this last acting choice. If he was as giddy for the whole commercial, this last bit would not have sold.
Now this commercial isn’t all roses. The pretty lady sitting right next to him on the couch WAY overacts. My assumption is that she should be playing bored and unimpressed maybe. Just too much movement and too many ideas going on to be believable.
Let me know your thoughts.
|Ben
Flight
1October 7, 2010
Animating convincing flight is a real challenge. Just like anything else, you need to do your research. Flight is VERY easy to get wrong, and then you risk losing your audience. Viewers can just feel that something is… off.
The animators who worked on How to Train Your Dragon spent countless hours studying flight from real life reference of flying creatures. They also looked at both convincing and unconvincing animated flying creatures in films.
Brendon Body, animator on Legend of the Guardians, has done plenty of similar research and put it all in one place for your educational pleasure! Take advantage of his awesome tutorial for animating flight.
I highly suggest reading this tutorial and studying all of his great examples. He picks apart live action footage to help you understand bird mechanics, and has compiled plenty of wonderful reference materials that are now at your disposal. Don’t pass this up.
Animated Dance
5I recently shared a video from the intertubes featuring animated dancing. To preface the clip, I stated that I am practically never a fan of animated dancing. In the comments, “someguy” asked me why.
Rather than write a quick response in the comments I figured I could make a post out of it. I have no intentions for this post to be a personal rant. It is designed to be more of an informative, discussion-inspiring post, albeit peppered with my own opinions.
Dance is a wonderful medium. It is an excellent form of individual expression; it’s beautiful, it’s touching, it’s very personal and meaningful.
Also, it’s incredibly hard to do well.
Seeing someone perform something elegant and beautiful with their body somehow entrances us.
“Someguy” also suggested that you can learn a lot about weight and balance from watching animated dancing. Perhaps, but I promise you will learn far more by watching real dance. If education is what you’re after, watch some live action.
There’s something very tempting about dance to an animator. Just grab that hip controller and start rotating it; suddenly your character is almost dancing already. It also seems to test well with kids, which gets the attention of studios. For a while there was a HUGE trend in animated dancing on the big screen. Especially during credit sequences. I just got tired of seeing it everywhere. While I understand its draw, I have two major problems with it. Both stem from the core of what dance really is, and how animation usually fails to meet it.
First, it’s really cool to see people create interesting movements with their bodies. However, once it’s translated into animation – in my opinion – it usually loses what it had in real life.
If you were to animate the above video would it be an awesome animation? In my opinion, no. You can do anything in animation anyway, so why would anyone care that you can ‘break’ the character and move it in an unnatural way. But when you see a person actually do it – wow.
Secondly, most dance is about personal expression. The dancer is expressing a part of themselves, and getting an emotional response from the viewer. It is truly an art form. When we animate dancing it’s usually because it’s fun to animate, but it rarely comes from a place of personal expression. It’s fun to show off our dance animations (since it’s so hard to do), but we rarely ever get any sort of emotional connection between the viewer and the character. For example, which of these two videos elicit more of a reaction from you?
Video 1:
Video 2:
Which one made you smile? Which one made you feel something? For me, when I watch the second video I laugh, I brighten, my mood improves. I am emotionally affected by the super-cuteness. They are exactly the same concept, yet one works and one doesn’t. Years ago that first video had people rolling on the floor laughing. It was the trendiest, most-passed Internet video, and everyone seemed to love it. I never understood.
Bringing this back around, the reason I posted the Dance Fortress video was that I actually found it entertaining (and now you know why that is rare for me).
There was SO much going on in the clip, and every character had a different style of dance (plus it was animated well), and it made me smile. Given the amount of unique characters, there was a lot of rewatch value, which is something almost nonexistent for the majority of animated dance clips.
I’m not saying it can never work, but I feel like it doesn’t work 95% of the time.
Here’s one I love:
And before you say, “well it works because it’s a frog!” Here’s a dancing turtle that doesn’t work for me. (reptile/amphibian, close enough?)
Well, what I think is different here is character. One Froggy Evening is a short designed entirely around a frog that appears bored as hell most of the time and on rare occasions will break into song and dance – but the tragedy is that he will only do it when he and his ‘owner’ are alone. There is an interesting dynamic between the happy-go-lucky feeling the frog creates (while he’s dancing) and the frustration the owner feels at the frog’s noncooperation. These are both emotions that can resonate with the audience.
Here is another:
This is a clip from A Charlie Brown Christmas. Snoopy is overcome with the music and feels the urge to dance. He slowly starts feeling the beat and before long he’s dancing on the piano. The music stops but he doesn’t, resulting in embarrassment. I think these are all emotions we can relate to. Who hasn’t felt the urge to dance to a song that really grabs you? Who hasn’t gotten caught dancing and felt a little embarrassed?
Even more importantly, this segment isn’t about the dancing itself. They don’t cut to all his sweet dance moves, or show how he can really sway his hips well or pop-and-lock. It’s not about the actual dance but more about the emotion that he’s feeling and expressing.
I guess my final point is that it has to mean something for me. Are you making the character dance just to dance? Or does it communicate something to the audience and is it ‘in character?’
|Jacob
