| Developing your 2d eye! |
| Welcome to "developing your 2d eye!" This will be a continuing series of topics that I feel are worth talking about. I'll mostly cover basic principles and things that I feel are extremely important to getting successful results in animation. The first topic I want to cover is what my friend Mike Thrumeier calls, developing your 2d eye. The day I heard that from him my world opened up! When I started animating at Blue Sky I was just coming off a tv series where I was more concerned with output quantity than quality. I felt like I had a handle of the basics but my animation was kind of hollow and without emotion. When I got my first review I had a note in there from my supervisor Mike about needing to developing my 2d eye more. Wanting to improve my work I asked him what he meant. Turns out it was a very basic piece of information that has been used in animation for over 70 years. 2d animators do it every time they draw a key pose an extreme or a breakdown. When a 2d animator does his scene he has to draw every frame. Every frame he draws has to be perfectly spaced, timed and drawn to make the scene work and the motion smooth. When most 3d animators do their scenes they pose out the character and figure out the spacing and workout all of the antics and so fourth, BUT they do one thing that could potentially make their scene weak. They let the computer do a majority of the imbetweening. What Mike was talking about in my review was me taking the time to look at every frame and making sure that there was a readable appealing pose. Not just letting the computer do the work but touching every frame much as a 2d animator would have to.
Copyright (C) 2005, Fox/Blue Sky Studios. Obviously the computer is going to imbetween the frames between your keys and then you will go in and add breakdowns, adjust the tangents to change the spacing and so on. After that though you should take the opportunity to adjust the poses and add little touches to make the pose more appealing. Check out the still frames I have included here to demonstrate that even on these frames the pose looks fleshed out. Time and detail have been put in to make the pose read and look appealing for the viewer.
Check
out this quicktime and really
look at the posing in the shots. I think the best example here is the
shot of Piper saying her name rhymes with viper. My friend Amber did this
shot and I feel like it is really solid. This is a good example of her
not letting the computer do the imbetweens. I know from working with her
that she takes a magnifying glass to her shots and nails everything. Think of it this way, you spend soo much time posing the character from head to toe; you should invest just as much effort on the frames between all of those poses right!?
In closing If you look around at a few of the projects in Development I think you your going to see some changes in how the animation and actual deformation of the models to make shapes is going to be reminiscent of the more graphic 2d animation from Disney and Bluth just to name two. Until now I have been restricted to the rigidity of the model and did the best I could to get a graphic pose out of it. Being able to reshape the model from pose to pose to get a better graphic look is something that I have never really done and it introduces a whole new mind set to the process. For the first time I'm being forced to be even more graphic along with acting. I think animation in general is starting to get very exciting again. Until 2d makes it's comeback, it will be fun to see some movies with the 11th principle (solid drawing) applied; even if it is computer animated.
That's it for now. Keep animating and thanks for stopping by.
Cheers!
-Mike
If you have any questions or comments WallingAnimation@aol.com
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