What Should Be the Main Goal of a Scene?

The main goal in a scene definitely varies from shot to shot. Some scenes are simply carriers that get us from one important scene to the next. Some are reactions that give the audience a taste of how someone is feeling toward a conflict or resolution in another scene. Some are comedic moments used to emphasize a point of humor.

So nailing down the answer to what is the main goal in a scene is difficult.

Not so fast, sunshine. Let’s dig a little bit deeper into this question.

Each scene HAS to have a purpose, right? I mean even the carrier scene that gently takes us from one cool shot to the next has to do something to the audience. OOhhh. That’s it! Do something to the audience. Each shot has to make the audience feel a certain thing – fear, happiness, sorrow, deflation, warmth. Why would a shot do anything else?

So the main goal in a scene should be clarity.

Wait a minute, you’re thinking. Weren’t you just talking about fear and happiness and carrier pigeons?

Well, yes to most of that. My point is that the audience HAS to feel what you are intending and the ONLY way to do that is to be clear in your shot. Someone should look at your shot and know instantly what is going on. It can be humorous or difficult but it MUST be clear.

Without it, you lose your audience. Lose your movie. Lose your job. Well, maybe not the last two things but it can definitely take the audience out of the film – something that needs to be avoided at all costs.

Clarity.

But how do you maintain clarity? Simple. Don’t overdo the point you are trying to make your character make. If he’s giving a declaration of what he believes in, make him stand up and maybe point to the heavens. He is making a stand! Don’t flail his arms around or make his head bobble like a baseball giveaway. Guide the audience’s eye directly to the most important thing in the scene. In this case – HIM! His mouth. His gesture to the heavens!

Clarity.

Is that clear enough for ya?

Guest Blogger Mike Gasaway

When Deciding on Acting Choices, What Factors Help You Decide on Poses?

Something that I like to convey with posing is the character's inner thought. This is something that they might be feeling but not showing in a very obvious way. Maybe the face will say 'mad' but the body pose is a bit 'frightened' or maybe the reverse (think about a mother who just found her child who wandered off in a crowded area. Her body language might show relief, but her face might show anger). Choosing your poses carefully can go a long way to help your character communicate complex inner feelings and give them great depth.

One thing I learned from one of my mentors (Mark Behm) while at Animation Mentor was that you should always write the emotions (or thoughts) out in words near your thumbnails while you are deciding on poses and planning your scene. It is a constant reminder of the goal of your posing. I can't say how many times I 'got into' a pose and started really working out some cool idea, and then looked over at the word written next to my thumbnails and realized that the pose I had drawn had stopped communicating the original emotion. I had gotten wrapped up in creating an interesting pose and lost focus of the bigger picture. Having those emotions written out helped me to quickly make the necessary adjustments and correct the poses. As he said, (I am paraphrasing) "It seems redundant, but go through the process every time." And then he disappeared in a puff of ninja smoke.

Guest Blogger Josh Riley

How Important is Networking in the Animation Industry?

The industry is small. Super small! There are tons of animators out there, but not that many studios. So it is inevitable that throughout the course of your career you are going to bump into people you've worked or studied with in the past, or know people that worked or studied with your colleagues. You know that game, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon? I am fairly sure the rules of that game would apply equally well to the animation industry. Almost every other day I find myself having a conversation with someone only to discover we both have mutual friends or colleagues we worked with years earlier. So having a good reputation is of paramount importance. Being professional, enthusiastic, hardworking and organized will get you very far. I once worked with an animator who believed talent should always override personality when looking for new hires. I firmly disagree with this. I would sooner take a less talented animator that is easy to work with and takes direction well, than an animator who animates excellently but doesn't gel well with the team or is difficult to deal with.

Networking implies, to some degree, that you make an effort to maintain contact with co-workers, or that you actively seek out individuals that are in some way connected to you and who can help propel your career forward. So for the sake of this discussion, when I refer to networking I am not talking about cold-calling, sending mass emails to the HR department of studios, or any other form of “telephone book networking”. To me, networking refers specifically to tapping your contacts, or people connected to your contacts.

The amount of effort you put into networking does not correlate with the amount of success you will have. If that were true then getting a job would be easy. But the reality is that you could tap a single contact for work and hit the jackpot. You've messaged the right person at the right time. The studio they work for needs people just like you, and all your positive traits become known to them very quickly. The next thing you know you have a job offer, all after just shooting off an email and a demo reel to the right person who knows you or knows of you. On the flip side, you could be an avid networker, keeping in touch regularly with friends who work in major studios, or HR personnel that have contacted you in the past. But if your timing is bad, or the right information about you doesn't travel to the right people, or anything about your reputation or the quality of your work doesn't impress the people hiring, then you could find yourself spending months to even a year looking for work.

So what does all this mean? If you don't have control over how smoothly and efficiently your networking efforts will be, then what do you have control of? Well, the answer is simple. You have control over yourself. Your behavior in the industry, your work ethic, skill level, and how well you get along with your co-workers and bosses, is what you can control. And truthfully, that is enough! You can survive without networking, and if you are really good at your job you can thrive without networking. Networking is simply a means to an end. It helps keep you active in the industry, but it is in no way the most important device at your disposal for finding work.

When I think back on all the animation jobs I've had, every one of them was through some sort of contact or referral from a connection I had. I wasn't consciously trying to network myself. I just happened to have a friend or a friend of a friend in the studio I was interested in. More often than not, this is enough. And this is often the case for most artists as they shift around from one studio to another. Most studios will tend to favor hires that have some sort of internal referral from people who have worked with the candidate. This is why your character is so important. Being a very small industry, word travels quickly about you and your work. But that isn't to say you need to always be trying to please everyone you work with. You should always try to be the professional version of yourself. You simply cannot control how people will react to you, and despite how professional you are, sometimes you'll rub people the wrong way and there is very little you can do about it.

Now for all the animation students reading this, you may need to rely more heavily on the quality of your demo reel rather than the contacts you have in the industry. Being new to the industry, you are automatically more limited in how far your networking can take you. But as I've explained, none of that really matters if you're a solid animator that's passionate about finding work.

Guest Blogger Aaron Gilman

What is Your Advice to a Graduating Student as They Begin Their Career as an Animator?

Never stop being a student! School is only the beginning of this life long journey as an animator. So continue learning, reading, checking out blogs, critiquing friends’ work, doing animation tests... even after you land a job! Also, do your best to always have a personal project in the works and work on it when you can. Working professionally is AMAZING, but keep in mind that you are helping someone else's idea come to life. So having your own thing on the side will keep your own creativity flowing, not to mention extra practice without the pressure of a deadline.

Networking. We hear this over and over again, but it’s true. Stay in touch with your classmates. See what they are up to, what they are working on or share something interesting you came across. Get some critique sessions going! Things like this will keep you excited and inspired.

Get out there and enjoy life! Ok, you just worked your butt off to graduate. And you might feel like you need to get a job right away. But make sure you take some time to yourself to recover. Relax a bit! Catch up on things you have been putting off. Go say hi to your Mom and Dad. Travel somewhere you have always wanted to go! Once you get a job, you will be busy again -- maybe even busier then you were as a student. We are passionate animators, but don’t forget that there are so many amazing things to this life. And all of these things help us to be better animators and contribute to keeping our ideas fresh!

Guest Blogger Jess Morris

How Do You Deal With the Animation Curves for a Character?

Animation Curves
Animation curves are powerful tools that allow you to have maximum control over your animation. However, if your curves are handled incorrectly they can become overwhelming to wrangle. Here are a few tips to help you get the most out of your animation curves. Some of these concepts should be familiar.

While working in a Layering method

Focus on the root- The center of gravity is the most important thing to get right when layering animation. Everything else will depend on it. If you can start from the root of the character and absolutely nail the physicality. You can use the curves of the root to inform the movement of the rest of the body.


Copy curves up the joint chain and offset- If you are dealing with a repetitive action such a run there will be several parts of the character that will loop in the same timing cycle. A quick way to rough this animation in is to solve for the root_y of the character, copy that curve to the root rotate x and the rotate x of all of the joints up the spine and even the neck and head. You and then play around by offsetting the position and scaling the values of the curves until you have some animation that feels organic.

Damper your curves to show energy settling- One of the things that will steal from the believability of your animation is the lack of residual energy. Body parts tend to stay in motion until something stops them. By dampering your curves you can show that gravity is gradually decreasing the movement of body parts. A dampered curve looks like a sin wave that gradually shrinks on one side.


Create sets- Use a script or a selection set to make groups of related controls easily selectable. Use the the curve of the driving force to inform the controls that follow. For example if you see a sharp move upward on the Y translation of your root, the chances are you will want to put positive values on the X rotation for the spine joints so that they drag against the upward root movement.


Scale your curves- Subtle animation can be difficult to refine because the movement is so small that it is hard to gauge if the mechanics are working properly. A great way to tackle this is to set buffer curves and scale up the curves for the section. By working larger it will be easier to troubleshoot timing, spacing and overlap issues. Once the scaled up version looks good you can refer to your buffer curves and scale the motion back down.


While working in the Pose to Pose Method
In step mode key every control on full poses- By keying every control for a pose you will be locking all of the elements of the character into position and keeping your curves clean. You will most likely not be utilizing every control, but you want to make sure that you are holding it's value. If you don't key it in and that control is used in a pose further down the timeline, eventually that value will drift over a series of frames causing floaty movement. Sometimes I do not include the facial controls when keying the full character.

Work clean- Keep track of what controls you are using to form a pose and try to stick to the same ones for your next one. By keying the same controls you will avoid animation curves that counter each-other.

Use tight break downs- Well what do tight breakdowns have to do with using curves? If you use breakdowns to fill in the gaps of your animation you will be relying less on the computer in-betweens. That way you will be saving your use of curves for what they are best at...refining.

When my keyframes are all set and I start breaking down my shot. I like to insert full breakdown poses on every controller on at most every 4 frames. When I set the break downs I am focusing on my transitions. Will this breakdown pose favor the previous pose and act as an ease out or will it favor the following pose and act as a fast out? Should I add a breakdown after my key that overshoots the pose? I keep these things in mind so that I use the posing of the character to dictate how the animation curves will be shaped.

Switching over- Once you have full poses on every control of the character on every 3-4 frames than you are safe to switch into a spline curve type. I like to use a spline type that will show a nice preview of my animation without having to clean up any tangent handles. I do this by using plateau tangents or spline with the auto-tangent script.


Hold off on offsetting- Once I switch over I will hold off on offsetting keyframes until I have taken a pass to tighten up the timing and posing. This is the first time I am seeing the animation on ones so there may be some tightening up to do. I will push full poses around on the timeline to adjust the timing and adjust the placement of certain body parts so that I can work some built in overlap into the poses. By working this way I am able to get my animation pretty far along before digging into individual curves.


Tie down your curves. -Usually, the first time i adjust animation curves on a pose to pose shot is the tie down. In this pass I will go through and edit the curves on the main body parts. (Usually the root spine and head, sometimes limbs) When I go through to clean up the curves I am looking for places where the curve is obviously not flowing like it is supposed to. For example maybe there is a curve that makes a hard transition that ends at two equal keys that form a flat. If I am not looking for a hard stop in my animation I will adjust that first keyframe that makes up the flat to ease out of the transition.


Cancel out counter animation- The tie down pass enables you to clean up your curves but it also serves as a pass to help you get familiar with what is going on under the hood and which controls are doing the heavy lifting. You should keep an eye out for counter animation during this pass. Counter animation happens during a transition where the value of one control cancels out the value of another. This tends to happen frequently on the rotate Y axis for Stewie and Bishop. If you see places where one control counters another see if you can remove the animation from one of the controls and add it to the other or redistribute the movement equally between the two controls.



While working straight ahead.
Use Gimbal mode on your rotations- If you use gimbal mode for your rotations your curves will be cleaner. Each handle of the manipulator will correspond to a single curve in the curve editor.
Using local and world modes will set values on all of your control's curves every time the manipulator is moved. This can make your curves more difficult to wrangle.


Set your default curve types to spline- When you are working straight ahead you want the poses that you set in the view to flow seamlessly from one to the next. Setting your default curve types to spline can help withe this process.


Frame staggers- A frame staggers is a quick way to add texture your movement. Staggers are great for showing wind effecting part of a character or showing trembling limbs while a character is lifting or pushing something. To create a stagger use the insert key tool to put a key on every frame of the control curve you want to stagger. Select every other keyframe and drag the value up to the extreme for the stagger. Grab the bottom row of keys and drag them down to the lower extreme of the stagger. Then take a pass through and adjust value to add some randomness to the movement.


Well there you have it. These are some tips and tricks that I use to get the most out of my time spent in the curve editor. Try some of these ideas out and see how they work for you.
















Guest Blogger Mike Stern