My Friend's Master Class!

A great video showing Kyle Balda's method for animating a two person dialog piece in 10 minutes. Really great quick explanation of ones work method. He follows a very similar method to me.



link to you tube and higher res

Kyle Balda was one of my earliest animation supes at PIXAR and one of the most influential and helpful animators in my career. Take a look it's great stuff.

--stephen

Pose 1 - Attitude

Lucky for Ratul his pose reads to most of you as devastated. Generally my next step after compiling the list is to then focus in on the emotion and start making even more lists. I find it to be pretty important to really dissect the emotion and find out what it means and start to establish visual definitions of the emotion as well. First lets define the emotion.

From Merriam-Webster On-line.
devastated

One entry found.

Main Entry:dev·as·tate
Pronunciation:\ˈde-və-ˌstāt\
Function:transitive verb
Inflected Form(s):dev·as·tat·ed; dev·as·tat·ing
Etymology:Latin devastatus, past participle of devastare, from de- + vastare to lay waste — more at waste
Date:1638

1 : to bring to ruin or desolation by violent action (a country devastated by war)
2 : to reduce to chaos, disorder, or helplessness : overwhelm (devastated by grief) (her wisecrack devastated the class)
synonyms see ravage
— dev·as·tat·ing·ly \-ˌstā-tiŋ-lē\ adverb
— dev·as·ta·tion \ˌde-və-ˈstā-shən\ noun
— dev·as·tat·ive \ˈde-və-ˌstā-tiv\ adjective
— dev·as·ta·tor \-ˌstā-tər\ noun

The second definition is what we are trying to communicate.  From here I start to think of visuals that symbolize this emotion or idea. I ask my self the question "what does devastated look like? I'm going to clue into the

"(devastated by grief) (her wisecrack devastated the class)"

part of the definition. We are trying to create a visual definition in our posing. We want to not only define the emotion but also tell a story much like this quoted definition. I'm going to start looking at the grief aspect of devastated.
The list begins;
1. Hands to face
2. fallen to the knees
3."why me?"
4. sadness
5. lowered head
6. deflated.
7. Closed off
8. etc, etc..

I'm looking for visuals that start to define the emotion. Then it's time to put these visuals into a story. Ratul gave us his story which was.

"I had imagined that the love of his life has died so he's shouting to god".

From here it's all about exploring and putting this stuff together. So I scour resources looking for visual symbols I can use, I reference other actors, I even try and get into the story myself and act out the pose.


I may just end up with the same results as Ratul had in his pose. The point of doing all of this is that each time you do all this research and exploration of an idea it just keeps building your visual library that's tucked away in your head. Also hopefully by spending the time thinking and exploring you can can come to more honest,original or true statement about what you are saying to your audience. WE are looking for extreme clarity, a very precise definition and we are telling a very specific story with only one frame. We can't really leave the pose up for too many interpretations because it just takes away from the power of the statement.

Let's look at Ratul's Pose a moment. I'll do more in depth post next going into his pose, but while looking at this pose think to yourself what could be changed to more clearly tell the story? Think about it as just one frame not a moving story that would eventually have other frames or movement but just as this one visual statement, about a loss of a loved one.



--Stephen

A Compiled List of the Emotions.

Thanks for all the feedback!

Ok Ratul, it's now your turn to let us know what it was you were going for in your pose. It seems that Devastation was the most thought of emotion. Is that what you were going for?

1. Anger
2. Devastation
3. Pain
4. Anguish -Tim Sormin
5. desperation
6. groggy -Cessen
7. frustration -Vince Gorman
8. The brow and the clenched fists make it hard for me stray away from anger/devastation/anguish. Maybe it's Maniacal Excitement? -Jason Fittipaldi
9. Elation...after scoring a goal?
10. Loss, Grief
11. dissatisfaction
12. excitement

RATUL'S RESPONSE:

I would say that devastation is the state he is in because of which he is feeling pain and anger both.
I had imagined that the love of his life has died so he's shouting to god.
Hope that makes sense.

Ratul

Pose 1 - Attitude

I sat down to look over the poses that were sent to me by Ratul and as I sat there starting to blindly make notes and doing draw overs to help push and clear up the poses that he had submitted, something just wasn't right. I kept thinking that this isn't helpful, that all of these scribbles really mean nothing? When I started this blog, it was supposed to be more, it was supposed to be more like a class, to be as interactive for the readers as it is for Ratul. Well here is my attempt.

Animation to me generally breaks down like this 70 percent of your time should be used for thinking and 30 percent of your time is used in the actual application of animation. In the dreamworld of expensive feature animation this formula is actually possible, but as you move down the quality chain from feature animation the formula gets greatly skewed probably in the other direction. Unfortunately your job as an animator is to try as hard as you can within the stress of deadlines to keep the ratio to as close as you can to favoring "thinking" over "animation application". Trust me it's hard.
There is no better place to start thinking this way about animation than with this posing assignment. At the start of this blog I posted a pole that asked which of the animation principles do you think are the most important? "Solid Posing" was voted as the second most important animation principle, with 25 percent of the vote. Posing is second only to timing as your most important tool as an animator to communicate attitude, emotion, humor, story, action, drama, etc. so it really should be something that you spend a majority of your time thinking about.
Over the years I have spent teaching animation, the biggest problem I encountered with students was their lack of thinking about what they are doing. Not thinking is the biggest misstep by any student. Animation is not math, there is no formula. There is no right or wrong answer, and there is absolutely no right or wrong way to animate. This lack of answers I think can tend to create many problems with people who don't have the ability to break free from the idea that there is an answer, and embrace the exploratory deconstructive nature that animation is. Each assignment is a journey that ends differently and for every person. Even after doing animation for the last thirteen years, every time I think I have figured animation out, and I go about doing X + Y to get Z, one hundred percent of the time it never works. In the end all that I'm left with is to go back to thinking about what I'm doing.
I think it is more important as a teacher to encourage people to think, to help the students solve their problems themselves, by giving them the ideas and tools needed to self critique to help them ask themselves the questions that I would ask myself while critiquing their work. I never found it useful as a student, or professional for someone to just draw over my pose or animation and say "more like that". To grow I needed to know why they drew what they did, what brought them to the decisions they were making. Hopefully so I would learn to see animation as they see it, eventually I would hope to see the matrix that they could also see.

enough;

OK, Ratul no comments yet.

Here is where everyone else get's involved. As you look at the image below I want to know what all of you think the attitude is? All we want to do is create a big list of attitudes or emotions that all of you think this pose represents. I'll compile that list ask Ratul if we were close and then we move on to the next step! This is the very first step in creating great animation. I'll start us off.


1. Anger
2. Devastation -Bobby Pontillas
3. Pain -Shiva
4. devastation -Paweł Ś
5. Anguish -Tim Sormin
6. groggy -Cessen
7. frustration -Vince Gorman
8. The brow and the clenched fists make it hard for me stray away from anger/devastation/anguish. Maybe it's Maniacal Excitement? -Jason Fittipaldi
9. ?????

--Stephen

Ratul's Poses

Hi everyone,

So Ratul has turned in his poses and I thought I would post them here first. Let you guys, if you want discuss them in the comments and then I would post my notes in the next post. Overall Ratul is doing great and I'm the one falling behind. Unfortunately there is a little game coming out called Brutal Legend that I'm trying to help finish, which is taking up large amounts of my time.

So here are Ratul's poses.





I'll post my notes soon,
--Stephen

The Pose Thing.

It's been awhile but we've all been keeping busy.

Ratul has turned his final version of the Box assignment. For the most part this assignment of moving a box around had little to do with the animation for me. I was more interested in how Ratul handled himself in maya and how he approached animating something. I believe it's important to understand how to manipulate objects and to pay attention to rotation orders and what your doing as you move forward in your animation. The next assignment I handed out was to create a series of poses.

1. pose and attitude
2. pose an action
3. pose two characters interacting with each other.
4. choose one of the above poses and add two more poses to that pose making a sequence of poses. Here is an example, if the action pose is a guy throwing a ball you would add two more poses making a sequence like the picture below.




While this assignment is a classic animation assignment I think it's important for many reasons. Communicating an action, emotion, and a story in on frame is the essence of visual story telling. Focusing in on one frame allows you to spend time on character composition, silhouette and provides time for you to actually design your visual statement. Other than the communication aspect you can also use this assignment to learn about and explore proper pose construction in computer animation, and practice your drawing and pose construction in traditional animation. I feel the previous block assignment is setting you up for this assignment, it's important to take what you learned or explored in the previous assignment and use that while posing your character. Again paying attention to the rotation orders and how a character is rotated into the poses is really important to your success when you begin animating.

P.S.
I was sent this awesome video by Keith Lango talking about Gimbal and I though I would re-post it for those of you who may have seen it, and those who haven't. What he talks about relates to my last post about keeping your rotation in order. What Mr. Lango is talking about here is probably one of the first things I learned in computer animation and to this day still one of the most helpful things I think about everyday on every bit of animation.

"Those numbers actually mean degree of rotation!?!?!" said an enlighten Stephen as he was shown the ropes by Ash Brannon while trying to animate Woody running around.

http://keithlango.com/tutorials/Gimbal_Solving.mov


More in a bit,
Stephen

Oh my!!!

So for the last 12 years I have had a binder full of Walt Stanchfield's amazing notes. Then today I found this, Walt's notes compiled in a two volume book. I'm sure I'm the last one to know about this book being out, but I had to share. Next to the "Illusion of Life", this book of notes for me has been second most valuable animation resource in my career. It's $30 but the minute you turn to page 4 and he starts to break down a simple Tigger jump, your mind will explode and you'll realize you would have paid $300. Oh and he does a better job than anyone at breaking down a poses in all their glory.

-Stephen